Professor Daniel Wolpert and Professor Zoubin Ghahramani have been announced the winners of two separate awards by the Royal Society.
The Royal Society’s medals and awards celebrate those researchers whose groundbreaking work has helped answer fundamental questions and advance our understanding of the world around us.
President of the Royal Society
The Society’s Ferrier Medal and Lecture is awarded to Professor Wolpert FMedSci FRS for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of how the brain controls movement. Using theoretical and experimental approaches, he has demonstrated the computational principles underlying skilled motor behaviour.
Professor Wolpert was Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering from 2005, and he held the Royal Society Noreen Murray Research Professorship from 2013-18. He is now Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University, but continues to hold a position in the Department working closely with colleagues. He will receive the Ferrier Medal and a gift of £2,000 at a future date.
The Society’s Milner Award and Lecture is awarded to Zoubin Ghahramani FRS, Professor of Information Engineering, for his fundamental contributions to probabilistic machine learning.
Professor Ghahramani will receive a medal and a gift of £5,000 at the associated prize lecture in 2021.
A total of 25 Royal Society medals and awards winners were announced today (4 August), nine of whom are researchers at the University of Cambridge. The annual prizes celebrate exceptional researchers and outstanding contributions to science across a wide array of fields.
Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society, said: “The Royal Society’s medals and awards celebrate those researchers whose groundbreaking 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.”
View the full list of Cambridge’s 2020 winners and their award citations.
Adapted from a Royal Society press release.
