New Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Awards announced

15 December 2011

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has announced the appointment of eighteen new Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders. The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with a permanent post at the host university.

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 focus of the award is a salary enhancement, usually in the range of £10,000 to £30,000 per annum.

The newly appointed award holders are working on a wide variety of projects including satellite concepts for reducing deforestation and mitigating climate change; developmental cognitive neuroscience; new biocatalysts by design and evolution; structural studies of the DNA damage response; and bringing the natural environment into real world decision making.

The full list of appointments is as follows:

 

Professor Andrei Andreyev

University of the West of Scotland

Nuclear Fission in 'new' regions of Nuclear Chart

Professor Jurg Bahler

University College London

Non-coding RNA roles in genome regulation and cellular ageing

Professor Heiko Balzter

University of Leicester

Satellite concepts for reducing deforestation and mitigating climate change

Professor Ian Bateman

University of East Anglia

Bringing the Natural Environment into Real World Decision Making

Professor Michael Bruford

Cardiff University

Conservation genetics and local adaptation: from genomes to population management

Professor Austin Burt

Imperial College London

Homing endonuclease genes and malaria control

Professor Daniel Calegari

University of Cambridge

Stable commutator length

Professor Kwangwook Cho

University of Bristol

Synaptic plasticity and pathology in the brain

Professor Christine Davies

University of Glasgow

Lattice QCD meets experiment

Professor Rene de Borst

University of Glasgow

A high-fidelity simulation methodology for evolving structures and processes

Professor Piers Forster

University of Leeds

Climate mitigation by short lived species

Professor Ian Hamley

University of Reading

Peptide-Based Biomaterials: From Self-Assembly towards Applications

Professor Malcolm Levitt

University of Southampton

Integrated Magnetic Resonance

Professor Stefan Maier

Imperial College London

Nanoscale control over electromagnetic fields from the visible to the terahertz

Professor Denis Mareschal

Birkbeck College, University of London

The Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience of Early Scientific Reasoning

Professor Nicholas Turner

University of Manchester

New Biocatalysts by Design and Evolution

Professor Jonathan Williams

University of Bath

Environmentally-benign catalytic synthesis of amides

Professor Xiaodong Zhang

Imperial College London

Structural Studies of the DNA Damage Response

 

 

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

www.wolfson.org.uk