Nicole Grunstra, PhD, from the Unit for Theoretical Biology, is one of this year's Gertrud Pleskot Award recipients, a Young Investigator Award (€7000) awarded by the Faculty of Life Sciences designed to honor young female postdoctoral scientists publishing in the top journals of their field. Nicole received this award for her work on morphological evolution in humans and other mammals, in particular crania and pelves. Her work includes the use of 3D geometric morphometrics and related digitization techniques and is driven by questions pertaining to evolutionary trade-offs in the human pelvis and the evolution of "difficult" childbirth, as well as by an interest in broader macroevolutionary patterns of morphological variation and how they relate to function and propensities ("constraints") of the developmental system.