Armita Manafzadeh, a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, the Department of Earth & Planetary Science, and the Yale Peabody Museum, has won the 2026 Carl Gans Young Investigator Award from the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB).
The award honors young researchers for distinguished contributions to the field of comparative biomechanics. Winners are invited to deliver a featured lecture at the SICB annual meeting.
Manafzadeh’s work combined high-speed X-ray imaging with comparative anatomy to reveal how joints move and evolve across vertebrates. Her research bridges biomechanics, evolution, and development to explain the diversity of motion in animals.
The SICB commended Manafzadeh’s “creativity and originality in comparative biomechanics research as well as her strong mentoring contributions.”
In 2024, she was first author of two paleontology papers: one on the evolutionary significance of leg joints in bird species, and the other on a new approach for visualizing how long-extinct animals moved.
Next fall, Manafzadeh will open her own lab as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech.
To learn more about the Carl Gans award, click here for more information on the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology’s website.
