Fellows are chosen for their outstanding contributions to scientific understanding. The 62 newly elected Fellows embody the global nature of science, and are elected for life through a peer review process based on excellence in science. Past Fellows and Foreign Members include Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Dorothy Hodgkin and Stephen Hawking.
At this time of global crisis, the importance of scientific thinking, and the medicines, technologies and insights it delivers, has never been clearer.
Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society
The Cambridge engineers announced as Royal Society Fellows are Professor Vikram Deshpande and Professor Stephen Young.
Professor Vikram Deshpande FRS, for his seminal contributions in microstructural mechanics. His works include developing ‘metallic wood’, sheets of nickel as strong as titanium, but four-times lighter thanks to their plant-like nanoscale pores.
Professor Stephen Young FRS, for pioneering the statistical approach to language processing - namely, treating conversation as a reinforcement learning problem - that made the speech-recognition products in millions of homes a reality.
Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society, said: “At this time of global crisis, the importance of scientific thinking, and the medicines, technologies and insights it delivers, has never been clearer. Our Fellows and Foreign Members are central to the mission of the Royal Society, to use science for the benefit of humanity.
Stephen Young, Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering
"While election to the Fellowship is a recognition of exceptional individual contributions to the sciences, it is also a network of expertise that can be drawn on to address issues of societal, and global significance. This year’s Fellows and Foreign Members have helped shape the 21st century through their work at the cutting-edge of fields from human genomics, to climate science and machine learning.
"It gives me great pleasure to celebrate these achievements, and those yet to come, and welcome them into the ranks of the Royal Society.”
The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Its Foreign Members are drawn from the rest of the world. The Society’s fundamental purpose is to recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.
The nine Cambridge scientists among the 2020 Royal Society Fellows.
