Professor Maria Byrne FAA—2019 Established Researcher Medal by the Australian Coral Reef Society for outstanding contribution to the science and management of Australian coral reefs
Professor Bruce Stillman AO FAA FRS—Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, for his ground-breaking research on the way DNA is copied in eukaryotic cells, a crucial component to understanding genetics
8 January 1936 to 28 April 2020
Professor Lord Bob May, Emeritus Professor at Oxford University and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, was admitted as a Corresponding Member of the Academy in 1991.
Professor Lord May was a skilled theoretical physicist and made major advances in the field of population biology, infectious diseases and biodiversity. He is celebrated for his research achievements and his contributions to academia as an inspiring lecturer and educator.
Professor Lord May began his career in the physics department at the University of Sydney and gained a personal professorship at the age of 33. He pursued his research interests in the dynamics of animal populations at Imperial College London and then at Princeton University, where he took up a professorship in the biology department. Here he used his skills as a theoretical physicist to make major advances in the field of population biology. Over the next three decades, these tools were further extended to the study of infectious diseases and biodiversity. His work led to major contributions to the science of ecology, including seminal contributions to the emerging discipline of ‘chaos’.
In 1988, Professor Lord May took up a post as Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University. He served as Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government and Head of its Office of Science and Technology between 1995 and 2000 and as President of the Royal Society between 2000 and 2005, having been elected a Fellow in 1971.
His fundamental research achievements and contributions as an outstanding educator were widely recognised by many international awards, elections to learned societies and honorary degrees. These accolades included the Academy’s Pawsey Medal (1967); the Knight Bachelor (1996) for services to science; Companion of the Order of Australia (1998); the Order of Merit (2002); the Japanese Blue Planet Prize (2001) and the Royal Society’s Copley Medal (2007), its oldest and most prestigious award. In 2001, he became one of the first people's peers in the House of Lords.
The Academy’s interview with Professor Lord May, conducted by Academy Fellow Professor Robyn Williams in 2008, provides further details of Lord May’s career. Please also see the tribute to Professor Lord May in The Guardian, the tribute written by Professor Williams and published by The Lowy Institute and the comments by the President of the Royal Society, Professor Venki Ramakrishnan.
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