| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Rachel Bowlby | | | Institution: | University College, London | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London, Emeritus since 2023. She was previously (2004-14) Lord Northcliffe Professor of English, also at UCL, and held posts before that at the universities of York, Oxford and Sussex. Beginning with a Yale PhD dissertation (in Comparative Literature) on novels about department stores, a principal focus of her research has been the history of consumer culture. Books on this subject include Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreisuer, Gissing and Zola (1985), Shopping with Freud (1993), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000) (on the history of supermarkets), and Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future (2022). Other work has focused on connections between feminism, literary theory and psychoanalysis: Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992); Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (2007). She has also written about everyday life, including the history of parenthood and reproductive technologies: A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories (2013); Everyday Stories (2016). Two authors have been the subject of monographs. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997) extended a previous book on Woolf, while Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025) returns to one of the three authorial subjects of Bowlby’s first book, Just Looking. Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism (2018) brought together a selection of essays in the various fields of her interest; it is joined by another collection of essays, Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024); this book is part of Edinburgh University Press’s Feminist Library series. Rachel Bowlby has also translated a number of works of contemporary French philosophy, including two books by Jacques Derrida. She has held visiting positions or fellowships at Cornell University (1990-91) and at the universities of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) (2007) and Otago (New Zealand) (2006), and delivered the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University (2008). She has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2007. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Andrew Balmford | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 205. Microbiology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1963 | | | | | | |
Andrew Balmford is Professor of Conservation Science in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, where his research focuses on how to reconcile biodiversity conservation with meeting human food needs and other land-demanding activities, and on the costs and benefits of retaining intact ecosystems. He collaborates closely with conservation practitioners and with colleagues in other disciplines including economics, agriculture and psychology. Andrew helped establish the Student Conference on Conservation Science, the Cambridge Conservation Forum, Earth Optimism, and most recently the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits. In his book ‘Wild Hope’ - which has since inspired a TV series - he argues that cautious, evidence-based optimism is vital in tackling environmental challenges. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Ben L. Feringa | | | Institution: | Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; University of Groningen | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Ben L. Feringa obtained his PhD degree at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands under the guidance of Professor Hans Wynberg. After working as a research scientist at Shell in the Netherlands and the UK, he was appointed lecturer and in 1988 full professor at the University of Groningen and named the Jacobus H. van't Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences in 2003. He is member and former vice-president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He was elected Foreign Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The German Academy Leopoldina, the Chinese National Academy of Sciences, Foreign member of the Royal Society (London) and Member of the US National Academy. Ben Feringa is member of European Research Council ERC. In 2008 he was appointed Academy Professor and was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands and in 2016 promoted to Commander in the order of the Dutch Lion. Feringa’s research has been recognized with a number of awards including the Koerber European Science Award (2003), the Spinoza Award (2004), the Prelog gold medal (2005), the Norrish Award of the ACS (2007), the Paracelsus medal (2008), the Chirality medal (2009),the RSC Organic Stereochemistry Award (2011), Humboldt award (2012), the Nagoya gold medal (2013), ACS Cope Scholar Award 2015, Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize (2015), the August-Wilhelm-von-Hoffman Medal (2016), the Tetrahedron Prize 2017, the Euchems gold medal and the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (jointly with J.-P. Sauavage and Sir J.F. Stoddart).
Feringa’s research interest includes stereochemistry, homogeneous catalysis, organic synthesis, asymmetric catalysis, molecular switches and motors, supramolecular chemistry, self-assembly, molecular nanosystems and photopharmacology. | |
| 4 | Name: | Mr. Fintan O'Toole | | | Institution: | The Irish Times, New York Review of Books | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Sandra Laugier | | | Institution: | Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Dolph Schluter | | | Institution: | University of British Columbia | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Dolph Schluter received his BSc in ecology in 1977 from the University of Guelph, Ontario, and his PhD in 1983 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the supervision of Peter R. Grant (elected to APS 1991). For his PhD thesis, Schluter studied ecological mechanisms driving assembly and evolution of island assemblages of Darwin's finch species. He and an assistant spent nearly two years living in a tent on remote and otherwise uninhabited Galápagos islands collecting field data. Schluter’s work on the finches culminated in the first estimates from nature of “adaptive landscapes” (mean fitness functions), which successfully predicted mean beak sizes of Galápagos ground finches on islands. He was able to compare these landscapes to fitness functions from survival data on natural selection, using a method he also pioneered, and to test evolutionary shifts caused by interspecific competition between species. This work was a key component of the long-term study of the Darwin's finches that is regarded as the most successful ever field study of evolution. Schluter obtained a tenure track position at UBC in 1989, where he played a steering role in building one of the world’s strongest research groups in biodiversity science.
Between 1983 and 1990 Schluter studied the evolution of continental bird assemblages, during which he developed methods to estimate convergence between faunas. This work led to a collaboration with R. E. Ricklefs that produced a highly influential coedited volume on global patterns of species diversity (Chicago, 1993). Schluter’s group continued to work on the evolution of the latitudinal gradient in species diversity. They showed, surprisingly, that speciation rates are often as higher or higher in the temperate zone, where few species are present, than in the much more species-rich tropics. This finding has since been confirmed by numerous other researchers.
In the late 1980’s, Schluter initiated work on threespine stickleback fish in BC, which enabled his landmark experimental and comparative studies on mechanisms driving the origin and divergence of new species. This work yielded advances on many significant research problems in adaptive radiation, and his stickleback species pairs have become one of the best-known natural study systems in evolutionary biology. The work inspired many ideas, culminating in his now classic text, "The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation" (Oxford, 2000). His subsequent collaboration with D. Kingsley and C. Peichel led to the discovery of key genes underlying species differences and made the stickleback a “supermodel” for studies of adaptive genetic variation. He continues to work on the ecology and genetics of adaptation and speciation in stickleback.
Research Interests
I investigate recent adaptive radiation, whereby a single ancestor diversifies rapidly into an array of species that inhabit a variety of environments and that differ in traits used to exploit those environments. I am especially interested in the selection pressures that drive the origin of new species, the ecological interactions that lead to the evolution of species differences, the genetic basis of these differences, and the wider impacts of diversification on ecosystems. I addressed these questions initially in field studies of Darwin’s finches, but over recent decades I have developed for study a natural system having many advantages for experimental study, the threespine sticklebacks of fresh water and coastal marine areas of British Columbia. My work has included the quantitative estimation of natural selection surfaces and ancestral traits, the experimental study of species interactions, natural selection and evolution, and the discovery of genes underlying phenotypic differences between populations and species and their fitness consequences. My second interest is the role of evolutionary processes and historical events in the development and maintenance of Earth's major biodiversity gradients. | |
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