Fred Leroy “Bud” Suddath was an innovative and inspiring scientist, educator and academic administrator, a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he eventually would become vice president for information technology, the university’s first.

By all accounts, this was a man who was well liked and respected by his students and colleagues, and when he died suddenly on June 17, 1992, his loss was felt throughout the Georgia Tech community. So a year later, to honor his memory and his contributions, Suddath’s family, friends and colleagues established the F.L. “Bud” Suddath Memorial Award.

The award goes to a doctoral student at Tech who has at least one year remaining in his or her program and who has demonstrated a significant research achievement in biology, biochemistry or biomedical engineering. This year, that student is Havva Keskin, who earned the top prize in the 2015 Suddath Award competition.

Keskin, a member of Francesca Storici’s laboratory in the School of Biology, was first author on a recently published paper, “Transcript-RNA-templated DNA recombination and repair,” that appeared in Nature. Now in the fourth year of her research, Keskin wins the $1,000 top prize, and her name will be engraved on the award plaque.

A second place Suddath Award ($500) goes to Ryan Bloomquist, a Ph.D. student in the School of Biology and a member of Todd Streelman’s lab, where he is studying dental patterning and regeneration in vertebrates. Bloomquist is on track to become the first student to graduate with a joint DMD/Ph.D. degree from Georgia Tech/Georgia Regents University – the first ever in the state of Georgia with this joint degree, as a matter of fact.

Third place ($250) went to Eli Fine, a student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of Gang Bao’s lab, where his thesis research focuses on developing novel approaches to precisely modify the genetic information stored in DNA.

As winner of the Suddath Award top prize, Keskin will give a presentation about her research at the next Suddath Symposium, March 2-3 at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.