Royal Society announces next round of prestigious Wolfson Research Merit Awards

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has announced the appointment of 19 new Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders.

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 looking at biodiversity; ocean carbon uptake; mass extinction events; and quantum computing.

The full list of appointments is as follows:

Professor Eric Achterberg - University of Southampton    

Ocean carbon uptake through physical and biological processes   

 
Professor Jose Antonio Carrillo de la Plata - Imperial College London    

Applied partial differential equations in physics and biology

  
Dr Ana Cavalcanti - University of York        

Formal methods in the verification and certification of safety-critical systems     

   
Professor John Colbourne - University of Birmingham       

Towards an evolutionary and functional genomics perspective of biodiversity

Sir Simon Donaldson FRS - Imperial College London         

Kähler-Einstein metrics and Gauge theory on manifolds of exceptional holonomy

Dr Jeroen Elzerman - University College London    

Quantumphotonics with spins in semiconductor nanostructures

Professor Desmond Higham - University of Strathclyde    

Stochastic modelling and simulation for interaction networks    

     
Professor John Irvine - University of St Andrews   

Closing the carbon cycle with solid state electrochemistry

Professor Michael Koehl - University of Cambridge

Pairing in two-dimensional Fermi gases   

Professor Jason Morgan - Royal Holloway, University of London  

Exploratory study of the chemo-physical effects of bend-fault serpentinization

Professor Benedict Murdin - University of Surrey   

Control of quantum superpositions for single atom devices in silicon

Professor Jim Murray - Cardiff University  

Multiscale understanding of cell division in plant growth and development 

Professor Bashar Nuseibeh - Open University       

Adaptive security and privacy

Professor Massimo Pinzani - University College London   

The liver as a priming immune organ in spontaneous Murine Crohn’s-like Ileatis

Professor Sandu Popescu - University of Bristol     

Quantum non-locality

Professor Wilhelm Schwaeble - University of Leicester     

Surface pattern recognition events determine complement-mediated lysis

Professor Paul Wignall - University of Leeds          

Mid Phanerozoic mass extinction crises: from the Guadalupian to the Toarcian

Professor Patrick Wolfe - University College London         

Statistical foundations for network modelling and inference      

Professor Xin Yao - University of Birmingham        

Foundations and applications of nature inspired computing systems

 
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