Médéric Diard, Institute of Microbiology, D-BIOL, ETH Zurich, Switzerland (group of Prof. Hardt) received the 2017 SSM award for his noteworthy investigation of the evolutionary dynamics of pathogenic bacteria. In particular, the virulence of Salmonella Typhimurium (Nature 494 (7437), 353-356, 2013), the selection for virulence by antibiotic treatment (Current Biology 24 (17), 2000-2005, 2014), and the impact of the host immunity on the dynamics of horizontal gene transfer during infection (Science 355 (6330), 1211-1215, 2017 and  Nature (544), 498–502, 2017).