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.