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Nine Cambridge researchers among this year’s Royal Society medal and award winners

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 05:00:00 +0000

He is one of the 25 Royal Society medals and awards winners announced today, nine of whom are researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��annual prizes celebrate exceptional researchers and outstanding contributions to science across a wide array of fields.

President of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan, said:

" ̽��ֱ��Royal Society’s medals and awards celebrate those researchers whose ground-breaking work has helped answer fundamental questions and advance our understanding of the world around us. They also champion those who have reinforced science’s place in society, whether through inspiring public engagement, improving our education system, or by making STEM careers more inclusive and rewarding.

"This year has highlighted how integral science is in our daily lives, and tackling the challenges we face, and it gives me great pleasure to congratulate all our winners and thank them for their work."

Sir Alan Fersht FMedSci FRS, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Chemistry and former Master of Gonville and Caius College, is awarded the Copley Medal for the development and application of methods to describe protein folding pathways at atomic resolution, revolutionising our understanding of these processes.

"Most of us who become scientists do so because science is one of the most rewarding and satisfying of careers and we actually get paid for doing what we enjoy and for our benefitting humankind. Recognition of one’s work, especially at home, is icing on the cake," said Sir Alan. "Like many Copley medallists, I hail from a humble immigrant background and the first of my family to go to university. If people like me are seen to be honoured for science, then I hope it will encourage young people in similar situations to take up science."

As the latest recipient of the Royal Society’s premier award, Sir Alan joins an elite group of scientists, that includes Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Dorothy Hodgkin, and more recently Professor John Goodenough (2020) for his research on the rechargeable lithium battery, Peter Higgs (2015), the physicist who hypothesised the existence of the Higgs Boson, and DNA fingerprinting pioneer Alec Jeffreys (2014).

Professor Barry Everitt FMedSci FRS, from the Department of Psychology and former Master of Downing College, receives the Croonian Medal and Lecture for research which has elucidated brain mechanisms of motivation and applied them to important societal issues such as drug addiction.

Professor Everitt said: "In addition to my personal pride about having received this prestigious award, I hope that it helps draw attention to experimental addiction research, its importance and potential."

Professor Herbert Huppert FRS of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and a Fellow of King’s College, receives a Royal Medal for outstanding achievements in the physical sciences. He has been at the forefront of research in fluid mechanics. As an applied mathematician he has consistently developed highly original analysis of key natural and industrial processes. Further to his research, he has chaired policy work on how science can help defend against terrorism, and carbon capture and storage in Europe.

In addition to the work for which they are recognised with an award, several of this year’s recipients have also been working on issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Julia Gog of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Queens’ College, receives the Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture for her achievements in the field of mathematics. Her expertise in infectious diseases and virus modelling has seen her contribute to the pandemic response, including as a participant at SAGE meetings. ̽��ֱ��STEM project component of her award will produce resources for Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14) maths pupils and teachers exploring the curriculum in the context of modelling epidemics and infectious diseases and showing how maths can change the world for the better.

̽��ֱ��Society’s Michael Faraday Prize is awarded to Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS, of the Winton Centre for Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and a Fellow of Churchill College, for bringing key insights from the disciplines of statistics and probability vividly home to the public at large, and to key decision-makers, in entertaining and accessible ways, most recently through the COVID-19 pandemic.

̽��ֱ��full list of Cambridge’s 2020 winners and their award citations:

Copley Medal
Alan Fersht FMedSci FRS, Department of Chemistry, and Gonville and Caius College
He has developed and applied the methods of protein engineering to provide descriptions of protein folding pathways at atomic resolution, revolutionising our understanding of these processes.

Croonian Medal and Lecture
Professor Barry Everitt FMedSci FRS, Department of Psychology and Downing College
He has elucidated brain mechanisms of motivation and applied them to important societal issues such as drug addiction.

Royal Medal A
Professor Herbert Huppert FRS, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and King’s College
He has been at the forefront of research in fluid mechanics. As an applied mathematician he has consistently developed highly original analysis of key natural and industrial processes.

Hughes Medal
Professor Clare Grey FRS, Department of Chemistry and Pembroke College
For her pioneering work on the development and application of new characterization methodology to develop fundamental insight into how batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells operate.

Ferrier Medal and Lecture
Professor Daniel Wolpert FMedSci FRS, Department of Engineering and Trinity College
For ground-breaking contributions to our understanding of how the brain controls movement. Using theoretical and experimental approaches he has elucidated the computational principles underlying skilled motor behaviour.

Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture
Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and Churchill College
For bringing key insights from the disciplines of statistics and probability vividly home to the public at large, and to key decision-makers, in entertaining and accessible ways, most recently through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Milner Award and Lecture
Professor Zoubin Ghahramani FRS, Department of Engineering and St John’s College
For his fundamental contributions to probabilistic machine learning.

Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture
Professor Julia Gog, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and Queens’ College
For her achievements in the field of mathematics and her impactful project proposal with its potential for a long-term legacy.

Royal Society Mullard Award
Professor Stephen Jackson FMedSci FRS, Gurdon Institute, Department of Biochemistry
For pioneering research on DNA repair mechanisms and synthetic lethality that led to the discovery of olaparib, which has reached blockbuster status for the treatment of ovarian and breast cancers.

̽��ֱ��full list of medals and awards, including their description and past winners can be found on the Royal Society website: https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/awards/

Adapted from a Royal Society press release.

A leading pioneer in the field of protein engineering, Sir Alan Fersht FMedSci FRS, has been named as the 2020 winner of the world’s oldest scientific prize, the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Taking the long view on climate change

bjb42 — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 15:53:42 +0000

̽��ֱ��Earth’s climate has always changed and no doubt always will. However, this alone does not tell us very much about the climate system: we need to be able to say exactly how and why climate can change. Today this requirement has been brought to the fore by the prospect of human-induced global climate change resulting largely from greenhouse gas emissions that arise from our massive and growing appetite for fossil fuels. Thousands of scientists are now striving to predict how a sharp rise in greenhouse gas concentrations will affect the entire climate system, including the ecosystems and societies that it supports. But how can we be sure about our theories of climate change, let alone our theories of ecosystem or market response? Just how important are greenhouse gases in controlling global climate? And what are the timescales and thresholds of climate adjustment? These are just some of the urgent questions that have been raised by the prospect of anthropogenic climate change.

To help answer such questions we can look to the past, at how the Earth’s climate evolved prior to the relative stability that human society has so far enjoyed. Researchers in the Department of Earth Sciences are taking up this challenge, using marine sediments as their lens into the past, and as a guide to the future.

Palaeoclimatology

̽��ֱ��study of past climate change – palaeoclimatology – aims to reconstruct what has happened in the past, in the oceans, on the land, in the atmosphere and in ecosystems, and to infer how the global climate system works ‘as a whole’. In the last 20 years of palaeoclimate research, three major questions have emerged that are particularly relevant to modern climate change. First, how did changes in solar radiation (insolation) and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) conspire to trigger massive global climate upheavals such as the glacial–interglacial (‘ice-age’) climate cycles? Second, what regulates atmospheric CO2 concentrations under changing climatic conditions, and what roles can we ascribe to marine biological productivity or ocean circulation changes in particular? And third, how abruptly can regional climate change and with what repercussions for the rest of the world?

All of these questions are interconnected of course, although each bears on a different aspect of the climate system’s ability to pace and amplify climate perturbations through sensitive ‘feedback’ processes.

Past climate by proxy

A central aspect of palaeoclimate reconstructions is the ‘proxy’ character of our observations. Because scientists cannot measure past ocean temperatures directly, they must measure the impacts of past temperature changes instead, usually based on temperature-sensitive organisms or temperature-sensitive chemical constituents in their shells or skeletons.

As a palaeoceanographer, Dr Luke Skinner specifically makes use of marine sediments as a window into the past. Among the many advantages of using marine sediments are that they can be obtained from nearly two thirds of the Earth’s surface, they generally provide unbroken and often very high-resolution records of past conditions, and they contain a diversity of constituents that can be analysed, from tiny fossil shells to grains of sand dropped by passing icebergs.

To reconstruct past climate change, Dr Skinner collects and studies the fossil calcite shells of foraminifera – single-celled blobs of protoplasm – that have accumulated on the sea floor. Using the shells of these tiny creatures, Dr Skinner has been able to generate detailed records of temperature change, both at the sea surface and in the ocean interior. In combination with ice-rafted debris and oxygen- and carbon-isotope records, these reconstructions have helped to demonstrate that the North Atlantic region experienced very intense and abrupt climate swings in the past, involving massive glacier surges as well as drastic changes in the deep ocean circulation system and the Gulf Stream. It has also been possible to show that these same changes in the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation were accompanied by a ‘see-saw’ in temperatures across the hemispheres, with heat pooling in the South to the extent that it was not efficiently delivered to the North. Based on records such as these it is now clear that global change can be heterogeneous and can occur too suddenly to be presaged by obvious warnings.

Perspectives on the future

Although it is clear that no previous climate period can really serve as a blueprint for the future, important lessons can still be learned from the study of the past. One important example is the use of palaeoclimate data to guide the improvement of our climate simulation models. Because numerical and statistical models provide our only means for predicting future climate, it is imperative that they be as general as possible. Studies like those described here are helping to achieve this, by revealing the feedbacks, thresholds and characteristic timescales for climate adjustment, across a wide range of climatic contexts.

In the future, global CO2 levels will only be stabilised if we either drastically cut our emissions or identify, trigger or create a process that ‘mops up’ exactly as much CO2 as millions of consumers are able to produce each day (the basis of carbon capture). ̽��ֱ��history of climate change tells us that we are going to need as many one-way fluxes out of the atmosphere as we can muster if are going to compete with the ‘leak’ we have created in the Earth’s largest standing carbon reservoir, the solid Earth. We have much to learn about the climate system, both for our own sake and for the sake of knowledge itself.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Luke Skinner (luke00@esc.cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Earth Sciences.

Cambridge Earth Scientists are contributing to our understanding of the climate system by studying the history of climate change recorded in sediments deposited on the sea floor.

Studies like those described here are helping to achieve this, by revealing the feedbacks, thresholds and characteristic timescales for climate adjustment, across a wide range of climatic contexts.

Irargerich from Flickr

Melting is your destiny

Carbon capture

Whenever fossil fuel (coal, oil or gas) is burnt, carbon is released as CO2 into the atmosphere, where it traps the Sun's heat. Can we counteract this build-up by capturing and storing CO2? Any solution would require storage of many millions of tonnes reliably and possibly for up to 10,000 years. Compressing and injecting CO2 into deep geological formations could provide the answer. ̽��ֱ��presence of oil, gas and natural CO2 trapped in reservoirs underground for millions of years demonstrates that storage of CO2 is feasible. At the Sleipner Oil Field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, CO2 is already being separated from natural gas and re-injected at about 1 km depth below the sea surface. ̽��ֱ��CO2 rises through the sandy earth before spreading out below a series of thin mudstones beneath the thick overlying mudstone. A collaborative research project between Professor Mike Bickle in the Department of Earth Sciences and Professor Herbert Huppert in the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics has been modelling the spread of these accumulations to work out how much CO2 is trapped and to understand the flow of CO2 in the reservoir. A particular challenge is to predict the behaviour of the stored CO2 over time to determine the safety of long-term CO2 storage in this way. ̽��ֱ��benefits are clear, as Professor Bickle explains: 'CO2 storage is a feasible, politically achievable and relatively inexpensive way for dealing with the problem of increasing atmospheric CO2 levels. For more information, please contact Professor Mike Bickle (mb72@esc.cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Earth Sciences.

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