This award feels completely incredible to me for multiple reasons. First, I came up with the idea behind this paper during the first COVID-19 quarantine when I was fresh out of my PhD and, unfortunately, unemployed. Developing a catalog of effectively all existing thermal performance curve models and comparing their performance across diverse datasets was something that a) had never been done before, b) I could work on from my room on my laptop, and c) did not require any funding. The days were bleak back in 2020, when I started this project, and the future all but certain, but here we are now!

Second, the Ecological Society of America counts among its ranks more than 9,000 ecologists, both from academia and outside it. For someone whose first academic degree was in molecular biology and genetics, the co-second place for the 2025 Outstanding Paper Award is a strong recognition of where my research journey has brought me. This achievement would not have been possible without the contributions of all my academic mentors to whom I am most grateful, but especially to Prof. Samraat Pawar from Imperial College London. Samraat and I joined Imperial within a few months of each other. He was then a Lecturer of theoretical ecology, and I a Master’s (and, later, PhD) student with a severely lacking background in ecology. Despite this, he was endlessly patient with me, always with a smile on his face, and encouraged me to set high goals and surpass them. A great deal of my approach to science can be traced back to Samraat, and I hope that one day I will be half the mentor he is.

In closing, I am eternally grateful for this amazing honor and look forward to seeing what the future holds!”