In the lead-up to our annual meeting in Anchorage, we’ll be highlighting the winners of this year’s AOS awards on the blog. This week, the 2019 Marion Jenkinson Service Award.
The Marion Jenkinson Service Award is given to an individual who has performed continued extensive service to the American Ornithological Society (AOS), including holding elected offices but emphasizing volunteered contributions and committee participation. The award honors Marion Jenkinson Mengel, who served the American Ornithologists’ Union as treasurer and in other capacities for many years, and consists of a framed certificate and an honorarium. The 2019 award is presented to Dr. Alice Boyle.
Alice is currently an Associate Professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. She earned a B.Mus. in viola performance at the University of British Columbia, then changed her career path to avian ecology, completing her Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Arizona. Following her Ph.D., she spent the next five years on prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at the Universities of Western Ontario and British Columbia before taking up her present faculty position in 2012. While Alice has an impressive record of research achievement, with 34 publications in ecology and ornithology, she has also tirelessly served the Cooper Ornithological Society, American Ornithologists’ Union, and now AOS in the six years since she became a faculty member at Kansas State. From 2013 to 2016, for example she served on the COS Board, simultaneously serving on their Student Presentation Awards Committee and chairing their Publications Committee from 2014 to 2016. When the AOU and COS began to jointly publish The Auk and The Condor, she became co-chair of the societies’ joint Publications Advisory Committee. Alice continues to chair this committee today, and provided leadership throughout the merger of the two societies in 2016 and the transition to the new journal publishing partnership with Oxford University Press in 2018. She also chaired the committee to identify a new editor for The Auk in 2018.
In recognition of her outstanding and diverse service to AOS and its predecessor societies, the society is proud to name Alice Boyle as the recipient of the 2019 Marion Jenkinson Service Award.