Amy Montanje receives the 'Kees Bakker Award'
Leiden Biology student Amy Montanje received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2018 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.
Amy Montanje received the “Kees Bakker award” from Professor Eddy van der Meijden in the presence of Director of Education Bachelor programme: Arthur Ram. The jury was impressed by her eminently evident academic skills (Cum laude, 8.4), demonstrated during her Bachelor study in Biology at Leiden University.
The award consists of a certificate of qualification and €1500,- which Amy Montanje 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 specialise in evolutionary or ecological studies.
The award allows Montanje to go on an internship in Kenya where she is going to study the diet of the African lion with environmental DNA analysis for her specialisation in Biodiversity and Sustainability
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 Institute of Biology Leiden 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.