Royal Society honours for two York scientists
Posted on 21 May 2010
Professor Robin Perutz and Professor Gideon Davies are among 44 new Fellows announced by the Royal Society today.
This is a worthy honour for Robin Perutz and Gideon Davies, who are outstanding scientists, and it is a resounding endorsement of the strength of scientific research at York
Professor Brian Cantor
It is highly unusual for two academics from one University department to receive the accolade in the same year.
Election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society is recognised worldwide as a sign of the highest regard in science. Candidates must be proposed by at least two existing Fellows and are assessed by Sectional Committees in each major field of science
The Vice-Chancellor of the University of York, Professor Brian Cantor, said: “The award of Fellowships of the Royal Society to two members of our Department of Chemistry is an exceptional achievement. This is a worthy honour for Robin Perutz and Gideon Davies, who are outstanding scientists, and it is a resounding endorsement of the strength of scientific research at York.”
Robin Perutz’s research interests are in organometallics and their photochemistry, reaction mechanisms and spectroscopy. He also carried out research on solar energy conversion.
He studied at Cambridge and Newcastle, gaining his PhD in 1974. He worked in Muelheim, Edinburgh and Oxford before becoming a Lecturer at York in 1983. He was made a Reader in 1989 and Professor in 1991, and head of the Department of Chemistry between 2000 and 2004.
He has given the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Tilden Lecture, the Dow Lectures at the University of Ottawa and the Seaborg Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, and was awarded the Nyholm Medal and Lectureship of The Royal Society of Chemistry for 2005. He received the Sacconi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society in 2008 and the Franco-British Award of the French Chemical Society in 2009. He is President of Dalton Division of The Royal Society of Chemistry until July 2010.
Professor Perutz said: “This is a great day for York Chemistry and especially for all those who I have worked with. I have always had hugely supportive colleagues and a very talented research group in the Department of Chemistry. It is particularly exciting that both Gideon Davies and I have been recognised in the same year. We both study reaction mechanisms - while Gideon studies reactions that occur in enzymes, I concentrate on reactions performed by metal-based catalysts.”
Gideon Davies, whose research focuses on structural enzymology and sugar chemistry, gained a PhD at the University of Bristol before moving to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hamburg and then to York with subsequent research periods in Hamburg, Grenoble, Uppsala and British Columbia. He was appointed as one of the University’s "40th Anniversary Professors" in 2004.
Professor Davies said: “This is a wonderful surprise and a great honour. It has been a privilege to work in the Chemistry Department in York with a team of very talented researchers. The atmosphere in the York Structural Biology Laboratory, reflecting the values of its founders Guy and Eleanor Dodson (also both FRSs) is unique in UK science and worth treasuring.”
Professor Davies has received a number of academic prizes including the 1998 Carbohydrate Research Award, the 2001 Corday-Morgan Medal and the 2008 Peptide and Proteins Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2006 Roy L Whistler award of the International Carbohydrate Organisation and, in 2010, the GlaxoSmithKline award of the Biochemical Society.
Notes to editors:
- More information on the University o0f York’s Department of Chemistry at www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/
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