Royal Society announces new Fellows

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society said: “Science impacts on most aspects of modern life, improving our understanding of the world and playing an increasing role as we grapple with problems such as feeding a growing global population and keeping an ageing home population healthy.  These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society are among the world’s finest.  They follow in the footsteps of luminaries such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and I am delighted to welcome them into our ranks.”

The new Fellows are:

Professor Shankar Balasubramanian, Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Senior Group Leader, Cancer Research UK, Cambridge Research Institute and Fellow of Trinity College is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology.

Professor David Klenerman, Professor in Biophysical Chemistry and Director of Studies at Christ's College has developed and applied new general biophysical methods based on fluorescence and scanning probe microscopy to study important biomolecular complexes such as human telomerase, key biological processes such as protein folding/misfolding, and to image functionally the surface of the living cell at the level of individual protein complexes.

Professor Tony Kouzarides, Royal Society Napier Professor at the Gurdon Institute, is a world leader in the field of chromatin modification and its roles in transcriptional control and cancer. His finding in 1996 that the transcriptional co-activator CBP is a histone acetyltransferase was one of the key discoveries that started the modern era of chromatin research.

Professor Margaret Scott Robinson, Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, is the foremost expert on the adaptins, proteins which recruit transmembrane receptors to budding vesicles and play a key role in endocytosis and protein sorting. She identified and characterised the clathrin-associated adaptors AP-1 and AP-2, and provided crucial insights into how they recognise different membranes.

Professor Mark Warner, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory and Fellow of Corpus Christi is one of the founders of the field of Liquid Crystal Elastomers and has thereby predicted new phenomena hitherto unknown to classical elasticity, liquid crystals and rubber, for instance large thermo and opto-mechanical effects, liquid-like shape changes, mechano-chiral response and soft ferro-electric solids.

Professor Daniel Wolpert, Fellow of Trinity College is a world leader in the computational study of sensorimotor control and learning, transforming our understanding of how the brain controls movement. Combining theoretical and behavioural work, he has placed the field of sensorimotor control firmly within the probabilistic domain and shown how neural noise plays a pivotal role in determining both how we process information during action and how we generate actions.

Also honoured were:

Professor Gordon Dougan, Honorary Professor in the Vet School and Fellow of Wolfson College.

Hermann Hauser, Honorary Fellow of Hughes Hall and Honorary Fellow King's College