Introduction of Kirsten Jensen as the Henry Baldwin Ward Medalist for 2014.

Members and guests of the Society, it is an honor and pleasure to introduce Kirsten Jensen, 2014 recipient of the Henry Baldwin Ward Medal. The career journey of each Ward medalist is similar: undergraduate degree, graduate school, usually a post-doctoral stint, and then finally an academic position. All have been productive in the study of parasitic organisms. And, yet, each Ward Medalist is a unique creature, and many come to the study of parasites as a result of a happy accident. Kirsten Jensen is no different in this regard. A native of Bremen, Germany, Kirsten came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall and attained her Vordiplom from the Universitat Potsdam. Kirsten applied for a student exchange program between the University of Connecticut and the Universitat Potsdam and came to the attention of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Chair Greg Anderson. Kirsten’s Vordiplom was a 3-yr degree, and this was problematic for placing her in a program at UConn. Greg was insistent that Janine Caira contact Kirsten, and so she did over the phone before leaving for the field. Kirsten was interested in marine biology. Janine told her ‘‘we don’t do marine biology, we do marine parasites,’’ to which Kirsten replied, ‘‘That sounds interesting.’’ Kirsten joined the Caira lab in the fall of 1993. At the time of her arrival in Storrs, the bulk of the lab contingent was in Baja, Mexico, collecting. On my return from Mexico that August I was informed a few days before heading to the San Diego airport that a young German woman named Kirsten would be arriving in Storrs to join the lab. Perhaps my long rusty German would get some use, I thought. As it turned out, Kirsten spoke better English than I did, and my German came in handy only for comic relief. Kirsten integrated into our lab group quickly, was given the unique nickname Aardwolf by Chris Nasin, and also became close friends with my wife, Alice. Early in her time at Storrs, Kirsten and her car also had a night time encounter with a patch of ice, with the car coming to a stop in the woods upside down. After receiving her frantic call, several of us left our beers at Ted’s Bar to try and put the car back on its wheels. That wasn’t happening until a guy with a truck and tow rope came to help. Kirsten completed master’s and doctoral work at UConn, with the latter leading to a 241-page monograph on the Lecanicephalidea. This cestode order was a neglected taxon before Kirsten made it her own. Her monograph was a real tour de force and served as a template for my own monograph a number of years later. To this day, I call Kirsten the Queen of the Lecanicephalidea. Kirsten completed a post-doc with Mark Siddall at the American Museum and then landed a tenure track position at the University of Kansas. The Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at KU is first rate, and I think placing a parasitologist of Kirsten’s caliber is great PR for our discipline. Kirsten’s CV speaks to her productivity as a student of marine tapeworms: 33 papers, 10 book chapters, 1 book, and 1 monograph. Kirsten has been involved in a number of invited seminars and symposia and of course has been an active participant at our Society’s annual meetings. She has also had a very active lab, with 28 presentations by students during her tenure at KU. Kirsten has been an integral part of the globetrotting effort to collect as many elasmobranch tapeworm species as possible. In the past 20 yr, I counted over 20 localities and 5 continents among the localities she has visited. The support letters for Kirsten’s nomination speak to her value as a parasitologist and especially to her contributions to the taxonomy and systematics of elasmobranch cestodes. In her letters of support, her work was cited to be ‘‘thorough and meticulous,’’ ‘‘influential and long standing,’’ and ‘‘the best taxonomic papers I have ever seen.’’ I have reviewed her manuscripts. They have been a delight to read, and I actually feel kind of lazy in that I don’t usually have much to suggest in terms of improvement. Her work with Ash Bullard on cestode larval forms from the Gulf of Mexico was a herculean effort and placed a number of tapeworm larvae in a molecular phylogeny along with adult worms collected from the Gulf. Kirsten did not just stop at a molecular characterization of these larval forms, but also used scanning electron microscopy to elucidate their morphology. Their work will serve as an invaluable resource for years to come for anyone interested in cestode life cycles. My students routinely use both the mitochondrial and ribosomal sequence data generated by Kirsten to compare to their sequence data. As valuable as Kirsten’s work on the taxonomy and systematics of elasmobranch tapeworms has been, her service to ASP and SWAP, as an NSF reviewer and panelist, in addition to her years of service as a reviewer and editor in the parasitological world has also been outstanding. It is here where her naturally meticulous nature really shines. To Kirsten, perfection is not merely a goal to strive for, but a natural end point. So to my great friend, trusted colleague and valuable collaborator, congratulations on being the 2014 Henry Baldwin Ward Medalist. Your journey to this point may have started as a happy accident, but the road between there and here has been marked by hard work and excellence.