Alexander Franz, PhD won the 2014 award for best paper in the journal Insect Molecular Biology. Sponsored by the Royal Entomological Society, the award recognizes the best paper over a two-year period. The paper, “Transgene-mediated suppression of the RNA interference pathway in Aedes aegypti interferes with gene silencing and enhances Sindbis virus and dengue virus type 2 replication”. More recently, his laboratory was the first to report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 for genome editing in the mosquito vector, Aedes aegypti (PLoS One. 2015 Mar 27;10(3):e0122353. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122353. eCollection 2015).