Pam Engelberts receives the “Kees Bakker Award”
Leiden Biology student Pam Engelberts received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2016 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.
Engelberts received the “Kees Bakker award” from Professor Eddy van der Meijden in the presence of Director of Education Bachelor program: Arthur Ram. The jury was not only highly impressed by the academic performance of Pam Engelberts, but also by her evident motivation and enthusiasm for ecological research and nature conservation.
The award consists of a certificate of qualification and €1500,- which Pam Engelberts should invest in her 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.
In January Engelberts will travel to Curaçao to gain knowledge on basic coral reef ecology and to perform a short project on the distribution of juvenile lionfish. Pam Engelbers: “Besides my trip to Curaçao, the award also allows me to partly perform my first internship on Sint Maarten, where I will study the resilience of wild and nursery coral populations. Both travels give me the opportunity to get in contact with researchers and institutes abroad and to learn from the experts in the field.”
About Kees Bakker
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. This discipline of study is continued at the IBL today by several investigators of plant and insect ecology; see for example the personal pages of the following investigators and teachers: Klaas Vrieling, Tom de Jong, Maurijn van der Zee, Peter Klinkhamer and Daniel Rozen.