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UK Royal Society elects new fellows

London’s Royal Society – the UK’s national academy of science – has elected 44 new fellows, who now get to put ‘FRS’ after their name.

Notable among the new class is Kostya Novoselov, who shared the 2010 Nobel prize in physics with his colleague at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim, for the pair’s experiments on graphene. (Geim was made FRS in 2007).

Mark Walport, head of the Wellcome Trust, is also elected, as is Hagan Bayley, a chemical biologist at the University of Oxford who founded Nanopore Technologies, a company working on sequencing single molecules of DNA by detecting electrical signals as the nucleic acid is threaded through tiny pores. And Bob Watson finally gets an FRS that many would say was overdue: a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he has advised on many key international environmental assessments, and is currently chief scientist at the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Among 8 new foreign members are Thomas Steitz, at Yale University, who shared the 2009 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on mapping out the structure of the ribosome. The full list of members is here; the Royal Society currently has 1,334 fellows and 142 foreign members. In bonus news for the world’s oldest scientific society (founded in 1660), this week it also won the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.

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