Through her discoveries of the roles of telomere sequences at the ends of chromosomes, and of telomerase, Elizabeth Blackburn has opened up an extremely important area of molecular biology research. Her laboratory has transformed our understanding of how cells age and die, and she has received the highest accolades for her work and leadership, including the Albert Lasker Award in 2006.

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Professor Rodney Brooks is an Australian who heads the prestigious MIT AI Laboratory. Professor Brooks is a pioneer of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He is recognised as being one of the top robotics researchers in the world. Professor Brooks has made significant contributions to robotics, in particular he opened up an entirely new area of research, called behaviour based systems. Professor Brooks has spent the last 20 years working in the USA. He has maintained strong links with Australia, by supporting Flinders University alumni; recently he has also conducted cooperative research with Professor Alex Zelinsky of the Australian National University, and has assisted to provide PhD and post-doc opportunities to Australians at MIT.

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Professor Marc Feldmann has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of the pathogenesis and treatment of chronic autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. Over the past 20 years his pioneering studies on the role of cytokines like TNF in autoimmunity have led to development of TNF blockade as a novel and effective therapy for patients with resistant rheumatoid and Crohn's disease. His work therefore is a prime example of "translation" of basic science into clinical practice.

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Professor Krebs' major contributions have been in population dynamics of small mammals, especially of sub-Arctic Canada. He pioneered experimental methods that demonstrated the importance of dispersal in populations of meadow voles, mice and lemmings. His textbook Ecology has been the standard work in North America since 1994. He was Chief of CSIRO Wildlife Research (1982-84) and, since 1993, has been an active participant and senior adviser on the Ecology program of the Vertebrate Biocontrol CRC and its successor the Pest Animal CRC. He was a McMaster Fellow (1992-3), a Commonwealth Fellow (1997) and a Visiting Fellow in CSIRO during 1999-2000.

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Professor Joseph Connell has been a major international figure in ecology for the past five decades. His PhD research began the field of experimental marine ecology and has stimulated hundreds of experimental studies that have explored the physical and biological determinants of the distribution and abundance of species. More recently, Connell has focussed on the important question of the determinants of biodiversity, particularly in Australian coral reefs and rainforests. He has made an enormous contribution to Australian science and to the research groups and many Australian researchers with whom he has interacted. Connell has also made major contributions to theoretical aspects of ecology, and to important practical applications of ecological theory. In 1985, he was awarded the prestigious Eminent Ecologists award of the Ecological Society of America. Five of Connell's publications, have been designated by Current Contents as "Citation Classics", reflecting his profound influence on the field of ecology.

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Please contact fellowship@science.org.au to request any updates to the data.

Professor Rolf Zinkernagel shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Professor Peter Doherty, FAA, FRS, for the seminal discovery of the phenomenon of "MHC restriction". The original work was carried out exclusively in the John Curtin School of Medical Research at ANU between 1973 and 1975. The significance of the discovery is three fold: first it solved the middle of the function of the major histocompatibility gene complex (MHC); secondly, it provided a basis for the mechanisms whereby the immune system distinguishes between self and foreign antigens; thirdly, it set the stage for much of the subsequent work on pathogenesis of autoimmune disease, organ transplantation and design of vaccines against microorganisms and tumours.

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Please contact fellowship@science.org.au to request any updates to the data.

Sir Michael Atiyah is one of the great mathematicians of this century. He received the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work on what is now known as the Atiyah - Singer index theorem. This is a very deep result relating the number of solutions of a partial differential coration to the topology of the underlying problem. Atiyah has a large number of Australian Ph.D. student and has collaborative links with Australian mathematicians. He is currently president of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College Cambridge and Director of the Isaac Newton Institute.

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In 1983 Vaughan Jones made a startling discovery in the theory of von Neumann algebras which has had a profound effect on such disparate fields as knot theory, statistical mechanics, quantum field theory and the prediction of DNA configurations in certain biological interactions. For this work Jones was awarded the 1990 Fields Medal. Jones is a regular visitor to Australia and collaborates with several with several Australians.

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