LAUSR

T HE Robert H. Gibbs, Jr. Memorial Award is presented annually by ASIH to an ichthyologist in the Western Hemisphere ‘‘for an outstanding body of published work in systematic ichthyology.’’ The Award was established in Bob’s honor by his wife Frigga and has been presented continuously since 1989. For 2013, the Committee, comprising Eric J. Hilton, Richard Vari, and Brian Sidlauskas, considered four highly meritorious nominees for the award. This year’s award winner has published—to date—nearly 100 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and books on a wide range of subjects. Nearly half of these are on Cyprinodontiformes and other atherinomorph fishes, including taxonomic changes, descriptions of new species, and broad-scale phylogenetic analyses. Other contributions include papers on the principles of historical biogeography and cladistics, general anatomy of fishes, methods in comparative anatomy, faunal descriptions on the fishes of Indonesia, and systematics and taxonomy of various groups of fishes. The awardee’s body of published work has been influential on the broader systematics community, without taxonomic bounds. This has been primarily related to publications related to historical biogeography, but also includes original analyses on a variety of organisms; the awardee’s first paper was even a systematic analysis of land plants. In addition to papers, the awardee has published and edited a number of books with colleagues, including such well-known titles as Cladistic Biogeography, Interrelationships of Fishes, and Ecology of Marine Fishes of Cuba. Most recently, the awardee coauthored a book titled Comparative Biogeography: Discovering and Classifying Biogeographical Patterns of a Dynamic Earth, which received the Smithsonian Institution Secretary’s Research Prize. This year’s awardee’s research program on fishes has truly advanced the field of systematic ichthyology generally, following from a research interest in the systematics and biogeography of tropical freshwater and coastal marine fishes. Through careful study of anatomy, development, and reproduction, the awardee has greatly clarified the systematics of many groups of fishes, perhaps most notably the killifishes, topminnows, livebearers, and their atherinomorph relatives. This research program has been supported by extensive field work conducted by the awardee throughout Indonesia. This advancement in systematics has come from not only the use of traditional osteological characters, but rather also from detailed studies of relatively poorly known, and therefore rarely used, anatomical systems, such as the nervous system and, most notably, reproductive structures. In addition, this year’s awardee has made tremendous impact on the science of historical biogeography, through clear and logical approaches to understanding how organisms have come to live where they do, often with fishes providing key examples for general phenomena. The awardee has described biogeographers as ‘natural historians with maps,’ which is a fitting self-description, and has emphasized the importance of scale, of both theory and empiricism, and of clearly defining the fundamentals—such as areas of endemism, their relationships, and the assumptions they are based upon—for unraveling the patterns of historical distributions of organisms. This year’s award winner is from New York and graduated with a Bachelors of Science degree in Biological Sciences in 1975 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The awardee moved to New York City to pursue a Ph.D. from the City University of New York, which was completed in 1980 based on research at the American Museum of Natural History under the direction of Donn Rosen. The awardee then entered into a ten-year period that included positions as a post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian, a NATO-NSF postdoc at the British Museum, short stints as a research associate at the American Museum and a museum specialist at the Field Museum, a fellowship at the California Academy of Sciences, and visiting scholar and adjunct positions at San Francisco State University. In 1990, the awardee became a Curator of Fishes at the National Museum of Natural History. From this position, the awardee has garnered a number of honors, including being named an honorary fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Indonesian Ichthyological Society, a Fellow of the