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Two Academy Fellows, Professor Marilyn Renfree and Professor David Craik, have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.

The Australian Academy of Science along with the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (DISER), today congratulates the 26 recipients of the Regional Collaborations Programme COVID-19 Digital Grants.

Experimental physicist Professor Ania Bleszynski Jayich of the University of California Santa Barbara is the 2021 recipient of the Geoffrey Frew Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded to distinguished overseas scientists to participate in Australian spectroscopy conferences and visit scientific centres in Australia.

Academy Fellows Dr TJ Higgins and Professor Toby Walsh have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Watch the full livestream of Falling Walls Lab Australia 2020 above.

There’s no way to rush a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Nobel Laureate Professor Aaron Ciechanover. “In the end we shall develop [a vaccine]. There is no doubt about it, but the way, it’s very long and we have to test every step and make sure before we move to the next one, because lives of people are at stake.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has not stopped Australian delegates to the 70th Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting participating in four days of online discussion and debates with Nobel laureates and other young researchers from around the world at the Lindau Online Science Days. The delegates are recipients of the SIEF–AAS Fellowship to the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, an annual gathering of bright young researchers from around the world and dozens of Nobel prize winners in Lindau, Germany

Despite an unprecedented global research effort and record-breaking times to first in-human trials there are no guarantees that a vaccine will be available soon for COVID-19, according to one of Germany’s pre-eminent virologists, Professor Doctor Marylyn Addo.

Professor Jane Langdale, of the Plant Sciences Department at the University of Oxford, and Professor Erwin Neher, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany, have been admitted as Corresponding Members of the Australian Academy of Science for their outstanding contributions to science.