Tracy Wietecha, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Research Group "Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body," has won the 2025 Essay Award of the Royal Society journal Notes and Records. The award was presented for her essay From Curiosity to Marvel: The Shared Experience of the American Agave Plant by Early Members of the Leopoldina.

The essay explores how early modern science encountered and interpreted the agave plant in gardens throughout Germany—not just as a botanical specimen, but as a powerful site of wonder, translation, and epistemic transformation that joined natural inquiry with divine contemplation.