Lauren Frankel wins ASPT's prestigious Cooley Award!

Tribble Lab postdoctoral scholar Dr. Lauren Frankel received the prestigious Cooley Award by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists for her talk at the 2026 Botany Meeting: “Introgression and trait evolution in the Neotropical bellflowers (Campanulaceae: Lobelioideae).” Lauren’s talk applied network-based ancestral state estimation methods to model how the reticulate evolutionary history of Andean Campanulaceae has shaped pollination syndrome and fruit type evolution. The Cooley Award is one of the highest honors for early career researchers in plant systematics and recognizes a talk that synthesizes an original, creative body of work. Congratulations, Lauren!!