Royal Society announces new round of esteemed Wolfson Research Merit Awards

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has announced the appointment of 28 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 science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential. Professor Mark Gross will be moving from the University of California, San Diego, to take up his position at the University of Cambridge and Professor Martin Hewison is moving from the University of California, Los Angeles to the University of Birmingham.
 
The newly appointed award holders are working on a wide range of projects including radar-tracking the movement patterns of bees, assessing how polar ice sheets contribute to global sea level rise, and the development of machine learning for precision medicine.
 
The full list of appointments is as follows:
 
Professor Graeme Ackland – University of Edinburgh
Interatomic potentials for oxide - metal interfaces in molecular dynamics

Professor Philip Bartlett – University of Southampton
Fundamentals and applications of nanoscale electrodeposition

Professor Sue Black – University of Dundee
The new biometric- your life in your hands

Professor Steve Bramwell – University College London
Spin ice and magnetricity

Professor Lars Chittka – Queen Mary University of London
Radar-tracking the spatial movement patterns of key pollinators

Professor Gerry Graham – University of Glasgow
Defining the molecular choreography of the inflammatory response

Professor Richard Grencis – University of Manchester
Understanding parasitism: Survival and immunoregulation of parasitic nematodes

Professor Mark Gross – University of Cambridge
Mirror symmetry and tropical geometry

Professor Graham Hargrave – Loughborough University
Energy efficiency through advanced optical diagnostics and modelling

Professor Jeremy Harvey – University of Bristol
Theoretical models of the kinetics of homogeneous catalysis

Professor Martin Hewison – University of Birmingham
Intracrine metabolism and the physiological actions of vitamin D

Professor Jonathan Higgins – Newcastle University
Histone phosphorylation in mitosis and meiosis

Professor Jonathan Keating – University of Bristol
Statistics of arithmetic functions and matrix integrals

Professor Peter Leadlay – University of Cambridge
The biochemistry and synthetic biology of antibiotics

Professor Lin Li – University of Manchester
Particle lens-based laser nano-fabrication and super-resolution imaging

Professor Oscar Marin – King's College London
Understanding cortical interneurons in health and disease

Professor Vladimir Markovic – University of Cambridge
Dynamics and geometry of curves and surfaces in negatively curved spaces

Professor Johnjoe McFadden – University of Surrey
Building an in silico description of the host-pathogen interaction in TB

Professor Rachel McKendry – University College London
New paradigms in connected global health for infectious diseases

Dr Sach Mukherjee – University of Cambridge
Statistics and machine learning for precision medicine

Professor James Naismith – University of St Andrews
Characterising membrane proteins by biophysical methods

Professor Alberto Naveira Garabato – University of Southampton
The role of mixing processes in ocean circulation and climate

Professor Andrew Shepherd – University of Leeds
Improved assessment of the polar ice sheet contribution to global sea level rise

Professor Michael Sumetsky – Aston University
Surface Nanoscale Axial Photonics (SNAP)

Professor Francoise Tisseur – University of Manchester
New approaches to numerical solution of nonlinear eigenvalue problems

Professor Geoffrey Vallis – University of Exeter
Geophysical fluid dynamics and climate

Professor Karen Vogtmann – University of Warwick
Outer spaces in geometric group theory

Professor Nicholas Zabaras – University of Warwick
University of Warwick Centre for Predictive Modeling in Science and Engineering

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