The Royal Society has elected 44 new Fellows, including several from the scientific and academic organisations that will form the Francis Crick Institute.
Royal Society Fellows are at the cutting edge of science worldwide. Their achievements represent the vast contribution science makes to society. The 44 new Fellows join a group of over 1,400 Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, all of whom rank among the international leaders in their field.
This year's new Fellows include Dr Gitta Stockinger and Dr Jean-Paul Vincent from the MRC's National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), Sir Stephen Bloom and Lord Ara Darzi from Imperial College London and Professor William Richardson from University College London.
Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, said: "Science helps us to better understand ourselves and the natural world around us and has a huge role to play in future economic prosperity and the health of our planet and its 7 billion people. In the coming decades we are going to find ourselves more and more dependent on the solutions.
"Science can offer to grand challenges such as food shortages, climate change and tackling disease. These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society have already contributed much to the scientific endeavour following in the footsteps of pioneers such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and it gives me great pleasure to welcome them into our ranks."
Dr Gitta Stockinger, NIMR
Dr Stockinger obtained her PhD from the University of Mainz in Germany. She then carried out postdoctoral studies at the Clinical Research Centre in Harrow, London, before returning briefly to Germany to work at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. From 1985 to 1991 she was a scientific member of the Basel Institute for Immunology where she initiated her studies of T cell tolerance.
Dr Stockinger moved to NIMR in 1991 and became head of the Division of Molecular Immunology in 2010. She was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2005 and to EMBO in 2008.
Dr Jean-Paul Vincent, NIMR
Dr Vincent obtained his first degree, in applied physics, from the University of Louvain in Belgium, before taking up a Fulbright fellowship for postgraduate studies in Biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. He then moved to the University of California San Francisco for postdoctoral training.
In 1993, Dr Vincent started his own research group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge where he further developed his interests in epithelial patterning. In 1997 he moved to NIMR, where he became joint head of the Division of Developmental Biology in 2012. He is a member of British Society for Developmental Biology, the British Society for Cell Biology and the British Genetics Society. He was elected to EMBO in 2006 and to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2010.
