The Academy of Medical Sciences has elected 60 outstanding biomedical and health scientists to its influential Fellowship, it has been announced.
The new Fellows have been recognised for their remarkable contributions to biomedical and health science and their ability to generate new knowledge and improve the health of people everywhere.
At a time when COVID-19 has added to the challenges young people face, many of the Academy’s newly elected Fellows are at the forefront of child and adolescent health.
The new Fellows are advancing biomedical sciences in innovative ways for a broad range of health challenges. New Fellow Dr Chun-Wa Chung FMedSci’s work at GlaxoSmithKline on epigenetic proteins has enabled the design of new protein inhibitors, with several progressed into clinical trials for cancer and inflammatory diseases. Professor Nicola Curtin FMedSci has also made major contributions to the development of new classes of anticancer drugs, including a life-saving ovarian cancer treatment. Dr Sjors Scheres FMedSci has developed new methods to visualise the structures of proteins from the human brain and reported the first ever high-resolution structures of Alzheimer's disease tau filaments, which had important implications for disease classifications.
Demonstrating the team science principle that the Academy embodies, Professor Mary Renfrew FMedSci, the first midwife to be elected to the Academy, developed multidisciplinary collaborations which have had a profound impact on public health policy and midwifery practice nationally and internationally. Professor Catherine Sudlow FMedSci is a clinical epidemiologist who promotes the use of large scale, collaborative, big data approaches to understand the causes, consequences of, and best treatments for a wide range of diseases.
Professor Dame Anne Johnson PMedSci, President of The Academy of Medical Sciences, said: “It gives me great pleasure to welcome these 60 experts to the Fellowship to help to address the major health challenges facing society.
“Each of the new Fellows has made important contributions to the health of our society, with a breadth of expertise ranging from the physical and mental health of young people to parasitic diseases and computational biology.
“The diversity of biomedical and health expertise within our Fellowship is a formidable asset that in the past year has informed our work on critical issues such as tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, understanding the health impacts of climate change, addressing health inequalities, and making the case for funding science. The new Fellows of 2022 will be critical to helping us deliver our ambitious 10-year strategy that we will launch later this year.”