Nobel prize-winning biologist Paul Nurse, 61, has been tapped to lead the elite Royal Society of London, the British society announced today.

Nurse, former chief of Cancer Research UK and now president of Rockefeller University in New York, won the 2001 Nobel in medicine and physiology for his role in identifying the enzyme cyclin-dependent kinase as the key regulator of cell division. He is stepping down from the helm of Rockefeller at the end of the year, although he will maintain a yeast genetics and cell biology lab there, ScienceInsider reports.

Although the society’s fellows must still approve the nomination, Nurse is expected to succeed astrophysicist Martin Rees as the 60th president of the 350-year-old society in December. Other past presidents include physicist Isaac Newton, botanist Joseph Hooker, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ T.H. Huxley and, more recently, biophysicist Aaron Klug and theoretical ecologist Robert May.

Nurse, a British national whose long list of accolades include the 1998 Lasker prize and knighthood in 1999, first moved across the pond to New York in 2003. Upon applying for his green card to live in the US, the famed biologist learned some startling facts about his own genetics. You can hear Nurse’s account, as told last June at the World Science Festival in New York, at the Moth podcast, a story-telling roundtable series.

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