Fellows update: June 2026
- 4 mins read
Honours and awards to Fellows
Professor Chris Dickman FAA – Chris Dickman Medal, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales
Professor Rajeev Varshney FAA FRS – 2026 Top Agri-food Pioneer, World Food Prize Foundation
King’s Birthday Honours List 2026
- Professor Terry Tao AC FAA FRS – Companion of the Order of Australia
- Emeritus Professor David Blair AO FAA – Officer of the Order of Australia
- Professor Jozef Gécz AO FAA FAHMS – Officer of the Order of Australia
- Professor Mariapia Degli-Esposti AM FAA FAHMS – Member of the Order of Australia
- Professor Zheng-Xiang Li AM FAA – Member of the Order of Australia
- Professor Ryan Lister AM FAA – Member of the Order of Australia
Read more about the Fellows recognised in the King’s Birthday Honours List 2026.
Obituaries
Dr Peter Raven FAA FRS NAS
13 June 1936 – 25 April 2026
Dr Peter Raven was elected to the Academy in 1990 as a Corresponding Member for his work as a distinguished plant taxonomist. His research on several groups of plants, biogeography and rainforests had many connections to Australia.
Dr Raven was born in Shanghai in 1936 to American parents who later returned to the United States in the late 1930s. He completed his A.B (highest honours) in 1957 at the University of California Berkley and his PhD in 1960 at the University of California Los Angeles. During the early days of his career, he would complete fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, studying folk taxonomy. This would give him a deep appreciation of the relationship between plants and people as well as encouraging his commitment to conservation.
Dr Raven went on to serve as an Assistant Professor and later an Associate Professor at Stanford University from 1962 to 1971. After this, and for nearly 40 years, Dr Raven served as Director and President of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis. During his leadership at the Garden, he transformed it into a global hub for research, education, horticultural display and sustainability.
Dr Raven became a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (US) in 1977, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2002, and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was the recipient of the Rudi Lemberg Travelling Fellowship in 1981 which allows either Australian or overseas scientists of standing to visit Australian scientific centres and deliver lectures. His Lemberg Fellowship lectures recognised his influence in the field of Australasian biogeography and the study of continental drift.
He held many international honours including the International Prize for Biology from Japan, 22 Honorary Doctor of Science degrees, and many achievement and distinguished service awards and medals. In 2000, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists established the Peter Raven Award in his honour to be given to a plant systematist who has made exceptional efforts at outreach to non-scientists.
Professor Emeritus David Doddrell AM FAA
18 July 1944 – 19 May 2026
Professor Emeritus David Doddrell was elected to the Academy in 1998 for his development of innovative and unique methods for applying NMR spectroscopy to structural organic chemistry, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and image-directed spectroscopy.
Professor Doddrell was born in Brisbane and completed his BSc at the University of Queensland in 1966. He then moved to the United States where he gained his PhD in 1969 from Indiana University. Professor Doddrell stayed in the United States where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and then later at Indiana University.
He returned to Australia in 1972 where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New England and then served in various roles at Griffith University until 1986 when he became the Founder and Director of the Centre for Magnetic Resonance at the University of Queensland until 2006.
One of Professor Doddrell’s major scientific achievements include being a co-inventor of the elegant ‘DEPT’ pulse sequence, now a worldwide standard NMR technique used by structural organic chemists. He was also the inventor of the SPACE method for obtaining chemical information from tissue even when nuclear relaxation times are very short – a technique used in the latest generation of high-performance commercial MRI systems.
Professor Doddrell's pioneering magnetic resonance methods enabled new ways of detecting the brain damage caused by stroke and Alzheimer's disease. His inventions are embedded in MRI imaging technology used in hospitals around the world, benefiting millions of people.
Professor Doddrell was Awarded the Rennie Memorial Medal for Chemistry (1975, RACI), the Fulbright Fellowship (1977, Stanford University), the Centenary Medal (2001), and the Clunies Ross Award (2003, ATSE). He received an Order of Australia (2008) and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (1978).
Professor Doddrell served on several Academy Committees including the David Craig Medal (2003) and the Le Fèvre Medal (2003). He also served on the Asia Committee (2004) and the Sectional Committee for Chemistry including Biology (2006–2011 and as Chair 2007–2008).
