Todd Streelman (Associate Professor, School of Biology) has been awarded the Abell Fellowship by the School of Biology for exceptional creativity and excellent scholarship. This fellowship is made possible by the Nelson and Bennie Abell endowment that provides funds for one year to advance the research of an outstanding associate professor in the School.

Streelman will use the Abell Fellowship to study the genetic basis of a complex male breeding behavior, in cichlid fishes from Lake Malawi, East Africa. Males attract females to their 'bowers' constructed from sand, and males of different species produce stereotypically distinct sand structures. Streelman's team will study how these structures are encoded in the genome and wired in the brain.