We are delighted to announce Parasitology's -prize winner for the 2023 Early Career Researcher Award (for papers published in the journal in 2022). Only researchers who are no more than 7 years post award of their PhD were eligible to receive the award. Decisions on the winning papers were made by Russell Stothard and his team of supporting Editors. The winning papers are freely available.

Leighton Thomas has been awarded the Early Career Researcher Prize for submitting the paper entitled: 

Lurking in the water: testing eDNA metabarcoding as a tool for ecosystem-wide parasite detection

Leighton Thomas was a post-doctoral researcher in Robert Poulin’s Evolutionary and Ecological Parasitology research group at the University of Otago. There he developed eDNA tools to detect parasites, these tools can be used to monitor aquatic ecosystems in the light of global biodiversity change and emerging disease, without the need to rely on traditional methods of taxonomy and lethal sampling. He is continuing to use molecular tools to monitor biodiversity as a post-doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change in Bonn. This project focuses on the use of metabarcoding to monitor insect populations caught in Malaise traps in German national parks.

Please read Leighton Thomas' blog post here.