Mário C. C. de Pinna Robert H. Gibbs, Jr. Memorial Award for Excellence in Systematic Ichthyology- 2020

ABSTRACT

Mário C. C. de Pinna, the winner of Robert H. Gibbs, Jr. Memorial Award for Excellence in Systematic Ichthyology, is featured. De Pinna's research interests run the gamut of systematic ichthyology, from phylogenetic relationships, taxonomy, and biogeography, to theoretical considerations of phylogeny reconstruction, species concepts, the history of comparative biology and its place within the sciences. And his contributions across each of these arenas have been profound and impactful. Indeed, while still a graduate student in the joint City University of New York and American Museum of Natural History program, they published a paper on "Concepts and tests of homology in the cladistic paradigm," a contribution that has been cited over 1,093 times since its publication and almost two decades later has been cited 90 times in the past five years alone. His professional career began while an undergraduate with a publication on a cave population of Trichomyctems, and in the ensuing years has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers. Most of these have focused on the broad sweep of catfish systematics from the resolution of basal relationships across the order to numerous analyses of the composition and inter- and intrarelationships of individual catfish families and genera.