Royal Society announces prestigious Wolfson Research Merit Awards

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has announced the appointment of 12 new Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders. The scientists started taking up their awards at institutions across the UK this month (April 2010).

Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract to this country or to retain respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

The newly appointed award holders are working on a wide variety of projects including DNA repair and potential treatments for Cancer; optoelectronics from graphene; and a new generation of stellar and planetary evolutionary models.

The full list of appointments is as follows:

Professor Sondipon Adhikari – Swansea University

“Uncertainly quantification in multi-scale computational simulations”

Professor Isabelle Baraffe – University of Exeter

“Towards a new generation of stellar and planetary evolutionary models”

Professor Andrew Blain – University of Leicester

“The most extreme galaxies: nature and driving forces”

Dr Simon Boulton – Cancer Research UK

“DNA repair defects and Cancer; mechanistic insight and potential treatments”

Professor Jonathan Cooper – University of Glasgow

“Advanced Platforms for Medical Diagnostics and Instrumentation”

Dr Andrea Ferrari – University of Cambridge

“Optoelectronics from graphene, nanotubes and related non-carbon nanomaterials”

Professor Christopher Garland – University of Oxford

“A study of novel, integrative cell signalling within small resistance arteries”

Professor Sunetra Gupta – University of Oxford

“Evolution, maintenance and dynamics of pathogen and host diversity”

Dr Kenneth Harris – Imperial College London

“The Neural Marketplace”

Professor Christopher Jones – University of Warwick

“Stability Theory of Nonlinear Waves and Patterns”

Professor Boguslaw Zegarlinski – Imperial College London

“Linear and Nonlinear Analysis of Large Interacting Systems”

Sir John Ball – University of Oxford

“Static and dynamic analysis of nonlinear materials”

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence.