Holistic Science Prize

Endowed by mathematics Professor Emeritus Hermann Burchard, this prize recognizes outstanding achievements in the College of Arts and Sciences in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or holistic academic research. Up to two prizes are given each year: one for faculty research, and one for research by a Ph.D. student.

 

2024 Winner — Wouter Hoff

 

A committee composed of CAS faculty selected fellow faculty member Dr. Hoff to receive the Holistic Science Prize based on his research paper, “Renewing Linnaean taxonomy: a proposal to restructure the highest levels of the Natural System.” In the article, Dr. Hoff and his two co-authors discuss the taxonomic system of living creatures that was developed by Carl Linnaeus in 1735, which has served as a central organizing principle for the biological sciences since that time. Dr. Hoff explained that the reason they wrote the article was a growing sense of disconnect between the formally accepted way to capture the diversity of living creatures and recent years’ rapid progress in discovery. In addition to spanning all biological diversity, the manuscript also covers the approximately 4 billion years of evolution of life. Inspired by the time scales used in geology, they introduce a “biological time scale” to emphasize major transitions in biological evolution and provide a framework for modernizing the Linnaean taxonomic system.

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