“Kees Bakker" award for Thijmen Breeschoten
Leiden Biology student Thijmen Breeschoten received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2013 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.
Breeschoten received the “Kees Bakker award” from Professor Eddy van der Meijden in the presence of Director of Education Johan Memelink. The award consists of a certificate of qualification and €1500,- which he should invest in his career for an international research internship.
The prize is awarded every year to the best BSc-student in Biology in Leiden with the highest grades and ambition to specialize in evolutionary or ecological studies.
The young investigator will visit Imperial College in London to take a closer look at the phylogeny of dung beetles based on mitochondrial genomes (Next Generation Sequencing data) using bioinformatics.
Kees Bakker retired as Professor in Animal Ecology in 1991 after 41 years at the Institute of Evolutionary and Ecological Sciences (which merged in 2009 with the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences into the Institute of Biology Leiden) and passed away in 2010. He was investigator of ecological competition among insect species, a vivid proponent of the evolutionary approach and wrote a well-known text book on ecology in Dutch.