13 Jul 09

The achievements of four Oxford academics have been recognised by the Royal Society in their 2009 Awards, Medals and Lectures.

Professor Sir John Ball has been awarded The Sylvester Medal, Professor Marcus du Sautoy receives The Michael Faraday Prize, Professor Sunetra Gupta wins The Rosalind Franklin Award and Professor Colin Blakemore is to give The Ferrier Lecture.

Recognising achievements in a wide variety of fields of research, the Royal Society gives the awards to scientists for the excellence of their work and the implications their findings have had for others working in relevant fields and wider society.

Professor Sir John Ball, Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy and Director of the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear PDE, said: ‘I am surprised and delighted to have been awarded the Sylvester Medal, and am honoured to join such a remarkable list of previous winners.’

The Sylvester Medal is named after James Joseph Sylvester (1814 - 1897) who was Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford in the 1880s. Given for the encouragement of mathematical research, the bronze medal has been awarded triennially since 1901 but will be awarded biannually in the future.

The Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize is awarded annually for excellence in communicating science to UK audiences. Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, said: ‘It is an honour to be awarded the Faraday Prize, the premier award for science communication in the UK. Science is about making great discoveries but equally it is important to communicate these breakthroughs to as many people as possible. It is great that the Royal Society's prize recognises the importance of communicating with the public.’

The Michael Faraday Prize was established in 1986 and previous winners include David Attenborough, Susan Greenfield and Richard Dawkins. Professor du Sautoy will receive a silver gilt medal when he gives the annual Michael Faraday Prize Lecture.

‘Faraday has always been a hero of mine,’ adds Professor du Sautoy. ‘He began the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1825 and it was these lectures given by Christopher Zeeman, another Faraday Prize winner, that I went to when I was a child that inspired me to become a mathematician. Hopefully my work will inspire another generation of scientists to tackle the many unsolved problems that we are still wrestling with.’

Professor Sunetra Gupta receives this year’s Rosalind Franklin Award from the Royal Society. She said: ‘My colleagues and I have worked for some time to develop and test new, and initially somewhat controversial, ideas on the evolution of pathogen diversity, and it is a great honour to have our work recognised in this way.’

The Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award is awarded annually and is funded by the government as part of its efforts to promote women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Professor Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology, receives a medal and a grant of £30,000, and will give a lecture on ‘Surviving pandemics: a pathogen’s perspective’.

The Ferrier Lecture, established to perpetuate the memory of Sir David Ferrier and his pioneering work on the functions of the brain, is given triennially. The lecture is on a subject related to the advancement of natural knowledge on the structure and function of the nervous system, and, of the 27 Ferrier Lecturers since the first in 1929, eight have been from Oxford or had strong Oxford connections.

'I am delighted to have been invited to give the Ferrier Lecture and to receive this award in the name of David Ferrier, one of the creators of modern neuroscience,’ said Professor Colin Blakemore, Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford University.

‘Ferrier laid the foundations for our understanding of the cerebral cortex, which has been the focus of much of my own research. It will be a particular privilege to give the Lecture as part of the celebrations for the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary.'