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It is our great pleasure to announce that the 2020 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science has been awarded to Tommaso Jucker. The Tansley Medal is awarded annually in recognition of an outstanding contribution to research in plant science by an individual in the early stages of their career (Woodward & Hetherington, 2010, 2011; Dolan, 2012, 2013, 2014; Lennon & Dolan, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020a,b). Tommaso is a NERC Independent Research Fellow and Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, UK. His research focusses on understanding the processes that shape the structure and function of the world’s forests, in an effort to predict how these will respond to rapid environmental change. Tommaso uses a range of approaches from manipulative experiments, long-term field observations and remote sensing to unravel forest productivity and dynamics and this is brought together in his Tansley insight ‘Deciphering the fingerprint of disturbance on the three-dimensional structure of the world’s forests’ (in this issue; Jucker, 2022a, pp. 612–617). In this Tansley insight, Tommaso considers and outlines a roadmap for integrating remote sensing with field data and individual-based models to build a comprehensive picture of how environmental constraints and disturbance regimes shape the three-dimensional structure of the world’s forests. More information on Tommaso and his research can be found in the accompanying Profile article in this issue of the journal (Jucker, 2022b, pp. 610–611). As with many things in the last two years, the completion of the 2020 Tansley Medal competition is later than we would have liked due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, we are pleased to be moving forwards now and want to highlight that the New Phytologist Tansley Medal is a global competition open to all plant scientists in the early stages of their career (including students and any researcher with up to five years’ experience since gaining/defending their PhD). Selection is a two-stage process. In the first round, applicants are invited to submit their curriculum vitae and a personal statement describing their scientific achievements to date. This will be accompanied by a letter of recommendation from a scientist who has agreed to support the application. For the second round, shortlisted candidates are invited to write a single-authored Tansley insight article on the subject area to which their research has contributed. Manuscripts are handled by relevant subject Editors and sent for external peer review, subject to the same rigours as any regular New Phytologist submission. All competition articles that are recommended for acceptance will be published in the prestigious Tansley review series of New Phytologist and the Tansley Medal winner selected by the judges from these final papers. We encourage applications from across the breadth of the plant science community and invite you to bring the Tansley Medal competition to the awareness of your colleagues and students world-wide. The 2022 competition is open for applications until 15 January 2022. Further information is available on the Tansley Medal pages of the New Phytologist Foundation website at: https://www.newphytologist.org/awards/tansleymedal. We offer our warmest congratulations to Tommaso and his fellow finalists, and we wish them continued success in their future careers. The judging panel for the 2020 Tansley Medal was comprised of the following New Phytologist Editors: Amy Austin (Buenos Aries, Argentina), Liam Dolan (Vienna, Austria) and Elena Kramer (Harvard, MA, USA).