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NCSE is pleased to announce the winners of the Friend of Darwin award for 2012: Judy Scotchmoor, the Assistant Director for Education and Public Programs at the University of California Museum of Paleontology who led the development of the popular Understanding Evolution website, and Zach Kopplin, the young activist who as a high school student in Baton Rouge in 2011 launched a drive to repeal Louisiana's antievolution law.
In a March 5, 2012, press release, NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott commented, "It would be difficult to think of another person who has done more, and in such a sustained way, to promote and improve the teaching of evolution" than Scotchmoor. The release also quoted Kopplin as vowing that despite the failure of the repeal effort in 2011, "[i]n 2012 I plan to fight the LSEA and keep fighting every year until it is repealed."
Scotchmoor and Kopplin join Carl Zimmer, Brian Alters, Marjorie Esman, Kenneth R. Miller, Niles Eldredge, Philip Kitcher, Lawrence Krauss, Howard Van Till, Steven Schafersman, and the Texas Freedom Network, to name a few, as NCSE's Friends of Darwin. The Friend of Darwin award is presented annually to a select few whose efforts to support NCSE and advance its goal of defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools have been truly outstanding.