Royal Society announces recipients 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 science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

The full list of appointments is as follows:

Professor Michael Cant - University of Exeter
Social development and life history evolution in animal societies 

Professor Candace Currie - University of St Andrews 
Developmental transitions in adolescent health

Professor Nicholas Dale - University of Warwick
The role of CO2 sensing mediated by connexin26 in health and disease 

Professor Matthew Gaunt - University of Cambridge
Catalytic C-H bond activation of aliphatic amines 

Professor Andrew Granville - University College London
Development of an alternative approach to analytic number theory, and arithmetic 

Professor Rebecca Kilner - University of Cambridge 
How does social evolution generate biodiversity? 

Professor Daniela Kuhn - University of Birmingham
Discrete structures and randomness 

Professor Jonathan Lloyd - University of Manchester
Unlocking the biotechnological potential of the subsurface 

Professor Robin May - University of Birmingham
Understanding the evolution of virulence in fungal pathogens 

Professor Adrian Podoleanu - University of Kent at Canterbury
Tuneable lasers for optical coherence tomography and their translation 

Professor Gareth Roberts - University of Warwick
Solving intractable likelihood problems through exact Monte Carlo methods 

Professor Alexander Ruban - Queen Mary, University of London
Quantifying plant adaptations to light environment 

Professor Daniela Schmidt - University of Bristol 
The future of shelf ecosystems in a warmer, more acidic ocean 

Professor John Smillie - University of Warwick
New directions in dynamical systems 

Professor David Stephenson - University of Exeter
Stochastic modelling for improving understanding of storm risk 

Professor Kate Storey - University of Dundee
Mechanisms regulating neural differentiation 

Professor Andrew Taylor - University of Edinburgh
Revealing the Nature of Dark Energy with Cosmological Probes

Professor Benjamin Willcox - University of Birmingham
Understanding and exploiting immune recognition of cellular stress 

Professor Tim Wright - University of Leeds
Improving seismic hazard assessment in the continents with satellite geodesy 

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence. The Wolfson Foundation is celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2015.