Announcement of the Fulker Award for a Paper Published in Behavior Genetics, Volume 51, 2021.

The Fulker Award was Established by the Behavior Genetics Association in Memory of David Fulker, a past President the Association and Executive Editor of the Journal, who died in 1998 (Hewitt, 1998). The Award is for ‘a Particularly Meritorious Paper’ Published in the Journal During the Preceding year. The Annual Prize is $1000 ‘and a nice Bottle of wine’ (Given only when the Recipient is Present at the Association’s Annual Meeting.)

Volume 51 included 50 rigorously peer reviewed papers on human and animal behavior genetics, including methodological and empirical studies, published in its six issues, including two special issues. To select the paper for the Fulker award, I solicit nominations from the journal’s Associate Editors and follow their advice closely.

Nominations from the Associate Editors included papers on animal models, human research, methodology. Among papers nominated were Thomas et al’s paper reporting the whole genome sequences of high and low activity mouse strains (Thomas et al., 2021), Maes et al’s paper on new way of modeling trait covariation (Maes et al., 2021), Rimfeld et al’s paper on responses to the COVID-19 crisis (Rimfeld et al., 2021), Elam’s paper on genetic risk for aggression and adult substance use disorder (Elam et al., 2021. Also nominated were Jordan Buck et al’s work on intergenerational transmission of nicotine related disorders (Buck et al., 2021), Conor Dolan et al’s paper on incorporating polygenic risk scores to estimate A-C covariance, (Dolan et al., 2021) and Eilertsen et al’s paper on direct and indirect effect of maternal, paternal, and offspring genotypes (Eilertsen et al., 2021).

Also notable this year were the special issues on Developmental behavior genetics and externalizing psychopathology edited by Liz Dilalla and Kit Elam, and on The International Workshop on Statistical Genetic Methods for Human Complex Traits edited by David M. Evans, Sarah E. Medland, and Elizabeth Prom‑Wormley.

Each of these papers and issues represents an outstanding contribution to our field. Please read and cite them if they are germane to your research.

But this year’s Fulker Award winner is the paper by Jared Balbona, Yongkang Kim, and Matt Keller that sets out a structural equation modeling approach for estimating of parental effects using polygenic scores (Balbona et al., 2021). For many of us, understanding intergenerational transmission has always been at the heart of our interest in behavior genetics, but it is far from easy to do and do right. Balbona, Kim, and Keller show that ‘By utilizing structural equation modeling techniques developed for extended twin family designs, [their] approach provides a general framework for modeling polygenic scores in family studies and allows for various model extensions that can be used to answer old questions about familial influences in new ways.’ Building on earlier work on using non-transmitted polygenic scores to estimate genetic nurture, ‘This is the first treatment of how transmitted and nontransmitted [polygenic scores] can be used to estimate the direct effect of parents on their offspring, and the first to account for the influence of different types of [assortative mating] on these estimates.’

So congratulations to Jared and his colleagues on their ‘particularly meritorious’ paper!

I thank all of the editors for their nominations and comments, and I particularly want to thank the authors of all the excellent papers published in volume 51. Please continue to submit your research to the journal, which is the official journal of the Behavior Genetics Association, and to read and cite the outstanding research we publish.

John K. Hewitt

Editor-in-Chief.