The Physiological Society’s Board of Trustees is delighted to announce the appointment of two new Honorary Fellows:
- Professor David Attwell FRS, University College London, UK
- Professor Lucilla Poston CBE, King’s College London, UK
Honorary Fellowship is the highest honour that the Physiological Society presents to an individual and it recognises persons of distinction in science who have contributed to the advancement of physiology.
The Fellowship appointments will be celebrated at the President’s Lecture and Award Ceremony which will be held on Thursday 4 December 2025 at The Royal Society of Medicine in London and online.
Professor David Attwell FRS
Professor David Attwell FRS is a leading British neuroscientist with a distinguished career spanning decades and a wealth of expertise in neuroscience and physiology. His diverse research portfolio includes investigations into glial cells, glutamate transporters, stroke, myelin formation, and cerebral blood flow regulation. Attwell is the Jodrell Professor of Physiology at University College London in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Here his lab investigates signalling between neurons, glial cells (microglia, oligodendrocytes and astrocytes) and the vasculature, as well as how the brain’s energy supply is controlled and determines the computational power of the brain. In 2024 Attwell was appointed as the Centre Director for the groundbreaking new BHF-UK DRI Centre for Vascular Dementia Research, a partnership between the UK Dementia Research Institute and the British Heart Foundation, to establish the UK’s first research Centre dedicated to finding new treatments to prevent, halt and ultimately find cures for vascular dementia. Attwell also served as President of the Physiological Society between 2022 – 2024.
Professor Lucilla Poston CBE
Professor Lucilla Poston is Professor of Maternal & Fetal Health at King’s College London. A graduate in Physiology from UCL her research focusses on the lifecourse of health, beginning with the fetus. Learning from animal models developed in her laboratory, she addresses the influence of obesity and diabetes in pregnancy on the long term health of the child. Approaches include studies of mother-child cohorts, development of pragmatic interventions in pregnancy and, recently, a new linkage of maternal and child electronic NHS health record data to interrogate the early life origins of disease at a population level.
Poston is President of the International Society for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an NIHR Senior Investigator Emeritus. In 2017 Lucilla was awarded a CBE for services to Women’s Health, and in 2025 was ranked by Research.com as being among the top female scientists in the world.
Previously Poston was the KCL Tommy’s Chair of Maternal & Fetal Health and the Director of the Tommy’s Maternal & Fetal Research Unit based at St Thomas’ Hospital, and Head of the KCL School of Life Course & Population Sciences.