Professor Leah Edelstein-Keshet of the Mathematics Department at the University of British Columbia is the recipient of the 2016 CAIMS Research Prize. Professor Edelstein-Keshet is a world leader in the application of mathematical methods and analyses to biological problems. She has written highly original and impactful papers on the characterization of collective spatial organization of biological organisms and of cytoskeletal dynamics and cell motility. One key feature of her work is the development of novel mathematical models and sophisticated mathematical and computational analyses of biological phenomena on all scales, ranging from molecular to cellular to populations. Her modeling and analysis makes insightful predictions, and she collaborates with experimentalists to test these predictions in order to refine the models. She has been one of the globally recognized pioneers of this highly interdiscipinary and relevant approach to the modeling and study of biological processes. She has also developed novel mathematical models for important human diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimers disease, and cancer.