Six Imperial scientists join Fellowship of Royal Society
3 May 2012
An evolutionary biologist, a pharmacologist and four physicists from Imperial joined the Fellowship of the Royal Society last month, as part of the 2012 election of 44 new Fellows.
They join the ranks of around 1,450 elite scientists recognised by the UK’s national scientific academy for their contributions to science and are now permitted to use the letters FRS after their name. They bring the number of Royal Society Fellows at Imperial, or those with an on-going association with the College, to 73.
The new Fellows are:
- Professor Michele Dougherty (Physics), a space physicist and Principal Investigator of the Cassini magnetometer instrument, which was launched onboard the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft in 1997.
- Professor Russell Lande (Life Sciences), a theoretical biologist who early in his career pioneered the use of genetics to study the evolution of continuous traits, such as height or weight, in natural populations.
- Professor Chris Hull (Physics), a theoretical physicist distinguished for his pioneering work on string theory, a concept that aims to unify all of the forces and particles of nature in a single quantum theory.
- Professor Tejinder (Jim) Virdee (Physics) who, for several years, led the team of thousands of international scientists that designed and built the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, one of the two main experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and one of the most complex scientific instruments ever built, weighing 14,000 tonnes and with a length of 30 metres and a diameter of 15 metres.
- Emeritus Professor Timothy Williams (NHLI), recognised for his contribution to the understanding of the mechanisms underlying inflammation. He was appointed Asthma UK Professor of Applied Pharmacology in 1988 and established the Leukocyte Biology Section at Imperial in 1998.
- Visiting Professor Jeremy Burroughes (Physics), one of the co-inventors of conjugated polymer electroluminescence, which allows light to be efficiently generated by passing electrical current through thin films of the plastic poly (p-phenylenevinylene).
— Simon Levey, Communications and Development
Tags: Fellows, Life Sciences, National Heart and Lung Institute, Physics
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