Honorary Members Archive - The Physiological Society

Donald M. Bers - Elected 2024

Catherine Ross - Elected 2024

Rose Anne Kenny - Elected 2023

Rose Anne Kenny is Regius Professor of Physic (Medicine) and holds the Chair of Medical Gerontology at Trinity College Dublin. She is the founding Principal Investigator of The Irish LongituDinal study on Ageing (TILDA) and Director of the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA) at St. James’s Hospital, where she is also director of a large national falls and syncope and autonomic function laboratory.

TILDA includes extensive research of physiological determinants of the ageing process as a measure of biological ageing.

She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, London and Ireland, a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine Ireland, and was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She has received a number of international awards and has published widely, authoring over 600 publications including, her recently published book “Age Proof – The New Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life” which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2022. In 2020, she was elected President of the Irish Gerontological Society. In 2022 she was nominated 24th Regius Professor of Physic at TCD (1637), the first female nominee.

Philip Nolan - Elected 2023

Professor Philip Nolan is a native of Dublin, Ireland. His childhood scientific interests ranged across astronomy, electronics, biology and medical sciences. He was the first member of his family to have the opportunity to attend university, and in choosing between science and medicine, felt he was not clever enough to be a successful scientist, and opted for the certainty of gainful employment offered by a medical degree. However, during his second medical year, he attended an open day in the Department of Physiology at University College Dublin (UCD), including a visit to the laboratory of Professor Ronan G O’Regan, where recordings were being made from carotid chemoreceptor and baroreceptor afferents. This led to his decision to complete an intercalated B.Sc. in Physiology, including a project on the effect of airway carbon dioxide on the discharge of sensory receptors in the laryngeal mucosa. Philip thus earned degrees in Physiology (1988) and Medicine (1991) at UCD. He returned to UCD to complete a PhD under the supervision of Ronan O’Regan on the role of upper airway sensory receptors in the control of breathing and the cardiovascular system during sleep.
Philip was appointed to the academic staff of the Department of Human Anatomy and Physiology at UCD in 1996, where he was fortunate to work with and be inspired by outstanding colleagues including Paul Mc Loughlin, James F X Jones and John B Moynihan. He won UCD President’s Awards for both Research and Teaching. His research interests remained in the areas of upper airway sensation and motor control, and cardiorespiratory control, in animal models and in humans, with a focus on understanding sleep apnoea, including important collaborations on signal processing and modelling with electronic engineers.
He became involved in higher education leadership from 2003, when he was appointed Director of the UCD Conway Institute for Biomolecular and Biomedical Research in 2003, before becoming Vice-President Academic and Deputy President at UCD in 2004. He was President of Maynooth University from 2011 to 2021, a period which saw unprecedented growth and diversification of teaching and research, and a doubling of the research capacity of the University. During 2020 and 2021, Philip was centrally involved in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland, as a member of the National Public Health Emergency Team, chairing its disease modelling subgroup and synthesising scientific advice on the management of the pandemic.
He was appointed Director General of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Irelands primary funder of science and engineering research, in January 2022, and May 2023, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD, appointed Philip the CEO-designate of Research Ireland, the new research funding agency to be formed by the amalgamation of SFI and the Irish Research Council. He is a strong advocate for the importance and value of fundamental curiosity-driven research across all disciplines as the foundation of a thriving research and innovation ecosystem. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and an Honorary Fellow of the Physiological Society.

David Paterson - Elected 2023

David Paterson is Professor of Physiology and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Since 2016 he has been Head of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics at Oxford (QS Ranked 1st) and is immediate Past President of The Physiological Society of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. He is a graduate of the University of Otago (NZ), University of Western Australia and New College, University of Oxford where he completed his DPhil on chemoreception. Rising through the ranks at Oxford from a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church then Tutorial Fellowship at Merton College, he became Professor of Physiology over 20 years ago. As a cardiac neurobiologist, he is best known for his work linking the nervous system to heart rhythm, which was featured in the 2012 BBC Four documentary Heart v Mind: What Makes Us Human?
He served as Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Physiology (2008-11) and The Journal of Physiology (2011-16) and has played a major role in academic publishing. In 2018 he co-authored with Neil Herring the text book Levick's Introduction to Cardiovascular Physiology, 6th edition.
Today, he is the European lead on an $8m transatlantic network of excellence grant from the Leducq Foundation that is focused on neuromodulation therapy and diagnostics.
David Paterson is an elected Member of Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe), and an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of New Zealand and in 2023 will receive an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Western Australia (HonDUniv in Medical Sciences).

Kim E. Barrett - Elected 2022

Kim E. Barrett

Professor Kim E. Barrett is a native of the United Kingdom, and obtained her B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees (in Medicinal Chemistry and Biological Chemistry, respectively) from University College London. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), she joined the faculty of the University of California (UC) San Diego in 1985, was promoted to Full Professor in 1996, and advanced to the rank of Distinguished Professor of Medicine in 2015. From 2006-2016, she additionally served as Dean of the Graduate Division at UC San Diego. In this capacity, she oversaw the recruitment, academic advancement and climate for more than 5000 masters and doctoral students. She also served as the rotating Director of the Division of Graduate Education at the US National Science Foundation from 2020-2021.

Since November 2021, she has been Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology and Vice Dean for Research in the School of Medicine at UC Davis, where she is leading initiatives to bolster both basic and clinical research activities. With support from the NIH and private foundations, her own research interests have centered on the physiology and pathophysiology of the intestinal epithelium and their relevance to inflammatory bowel diseases and diarrheal diseases, and have resulted in more than 300 publications.

Her scientific accomplishments have also garnered a number of awards and other recognitions, including the Bayliss/Starling Lectureship of The Physiological Society, the Bowditch, Davenport and Ussing Lectureships of the American Physiological Society, receipt of the degree of Doctor of Medical Science, honoris causa, from Queens University Belfast, the Distinguished Achievement in Basic Science award from the American Gastroenterological Association, and election as a Fellow of the International Union of Physiological Sciences. She is a Past-President of the American Physiological Society and is currently serving as Councilor-at-Large on the Governing Board of the American Gastroenterological Association. She has also been highly active in scholarly publishing, and completed a six-year term as Editor-in-Chief for The Journal of Physiology in 2022.

David Julius - Elected 2022

David Julius

Professor David Julius grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where he attended public elementary and high schools. David received his undergraduate degree from MIT (1973-77), gaining his first research experience in the laboratory of Dr. Alexander Rich studying mechanisms of tRNA aminoacylation. He then moved to the University of California at Berkeley for graduate studies (1977-84), where he worked with Drs. Jeremy Thorner and Randy Schekman to elucidate mechanisms of peptide hormone processing and secretion in Saccharomyces yeast, culminating in characterization of KEX2 as the first identified prohormone convertase. For postdoctoral studies (1984-1989), David joined Dr. Richard Axel’s group at Columbia University, where his focus turned to neuropharmacology and receptor function. During this time, David developed novel expression cloning methods that enabled him to identify genes encoding members of the serotonin receptor family. David then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco (1990), where he is currently the Morris Herzstein Chair in Molecular Biology and Medicine and Professor and Chair in the Department of Physiology.

A major focus of David’s work is to elucidate molecular mechanisms of somatosensation and pain, and sensory adaptation. His group has exploited the properties of natural products to discover a family of thermo- and chemo-sensitive ion channels that enable sensory nerve fibers to detect hot or cold temperatures and other noxious stimuli. With the aid of genetic, electrophysiological, and behavioral methods, they have determined how these ion channels contribute to pain sensation, and how channel activity is modulated in response to tumor growth, infection, or other forms of injury that produce inflammation and pain hypersensitivity.

David is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Honorary), and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (Foreign Member). He serves on the Board of Directors of the Diablo Regional Arts Association, a non-profit organization that brings performing arts and education to the California Bay Area. He is a co-recipient of the 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, the 2021 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (all shared with Ardem Patapoutian).

Gary Richard Lewin - Elected 2022

Gary Richard Lewin

Professor Gary Lewin was born on the Isle of Man and was the first in his family to go to university. He has led a research group at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, Germany for more than 25 years. Early in his career he discovered a critical role for nerve growth factor in the development of inflammatory pain hypersensitivity. Later he pioneered the study of the molecular basis of mammalian sensory mechanotransduction that underlies our sense of touch and pain. Both of these research avenues have led to the development of new therapies to treat sensory disorders. In the last 15 years he also introduced the naked mole-rat as an experimental model to probe the molecular basis of extreme physiology. Professor Lewin did his first degree at the University of Sheffield in Physiology and Pharmacology and his PhD at the University of London. After post-doctoral work at SUNY at Stony Brook he moved to Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow to work at the Max-Planck Institute in Munich. In 1996 he started his own group in Berlin and became a tenured Professor with a joint appointment at the Charité Medical University in 2003. Professor Lewin has received two senior ERC research grants in succession. He has fulfilled numerous leadership roles at the MDC and now responsible for one of three main research areas within the institute. He has served on many grant bodies notably as an ERC panel member for 10 years. He was elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2008. In 2019 he was honored with Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine a prestigious research prize in Germany.

Diane Lipscombe - Elected 2022

Diane Lipscombe

Professor Diane Lipscombe, Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science and the Thomas J Watson Jr. Professor of Science in the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University, is a leader in the field of neuronal calcium ion channel regulation and function in health and disease. She is a past President of the Society for Neuroscience, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the NIH. Professor Lipscombe studies ion channel expression, modulation, and function with interest in the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underlie neurological and psychiatric diseases. Her research team recently discovered a new mechanism that controls cell-specific pre-mRNA splicing of a voltage-gated calcium ion channel important for the transmission of noxious stimuli and the development of hyperalgesia in nociceptors. The recipient of several awards for teaching and mentorship, Professor Lipscombe has a history of working to improve and enhance graduate education and training.

Ardem Patapoutian - Elected 2022

Ardem Patapoutian

Professor Ardem Patapoutian is a molecular biologist and physiologist. His laboratory identified the molecules that sense temperature and pressure involved in touch, pain, and regulating blood pressure. Patapoutian was born in Lebanon in 1967 and immigrated to the USA in 1986. He graduated from UCLA in 1990 with a B.S. and received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1996. He joined the faculty of Scripps Research in 2000, where he is currently the Presidential Endowed Chair in Neurobiology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2017) and a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020). He is a co-recipient of the 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, the 2021 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (all shared with David Julius).

Irene Tracey - Elected 2022

Irene Tracey

Professor Irene Tracey is Warden (Head) of Merton College, University of Oxford, her alma mater and Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience. She has just been appointed as the next Vice-Chancellor at the University of Oxford and will take up office in January 2023.

Subsequent to a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, she was a founding member of the world-renowned Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (now WIN). She was its director from 2005-2015 whilst holding the Nuffield Chair in Anaesthetic Sciences. She then became Head of the over-arching Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences that merged anaesthetics, neurology, ophthalmology and FMRIB prior to taking up her current role.

Her multidisciplinary research team has contributed to our understanding of pain perception and pain relief within the human central nervous system using advanced neuroimaging. They also investigate the neural basis of anaesthesia induced altered states of consciousness.

Irene has served and continues to serve science through her election to Councils of: International Association for the Study of Pain, British Neuroscience Association, and Council of the Medical Research Council. She was awarded the triennial Patrick Wall Medal (2008) and made an FRCA by the Royal College of Anaesthetists (2009); elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2015); awarded the Feldberg Foundation Prize (2017) and British Neuroscience Association’s Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience award (2018); elected to the Academia Europaea (2020); and is President of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). In 2022, she was appointed by Her Majesty The Queen to a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Medical Research. She is married to Professor Myles Allen, a climate physicist, and they have three children.

Honorary Members Archive - The Physiological Society

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Honorary Fellows

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Honorary Fellows

Honorary highlights

Donald M. Bers - Elected 2024

Catherine Ross - Elected 2024

Rose Anne Kenny - Elected 2023

Philip Nolan - Elected 2023

David Paterson - Elected 2023

Kim E. Barrett - Elected 2022

David Julius - Elected 2022

Gary Richard Lewin - Elected 2022

Diane Lipscombe - Elected 2022

Ardem Patapoutian - Elected 2022

Irene Tracey - Elected 2022

Honorary Fellowship is the highest honour that The Physiological Society presents to an individual. It is awarded to those individuals who are ‘persons of distinction in science who have contributed to the advancement of physiology’.

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A N Richards

Catherine Ross

Charles Richet

F J W Raughton

Francis Peyton Rous

Frederick Stratten Russell

Harald Reuter

Ian Campbell Roddie

James Rothman

Max Rubner

Nancy Rothwell

Peter B Raven

Peter J. Ratcliffe

Richard Ribchester

Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

William Albert Hugh Rushton

A N Richards

Year of election: 1939

Catherine Ross

Year of election: 2024

Catherine Ross is the Chief Scientific Officer for Scotland, Scottish Government’s most senior clinical advisor for Healthcare Science professional issues, and head of profession for the scientific workforce within the NHS in Scotland. She provides expert professional advice to Scottish Ministers and Policy Officials and leadership for all aspects of policy which impact on the scientific workforce including education, research and clinical practice.

Catherine is a Chartered Scientist and Chartered Biologist and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, the National Institute of Prevention and Cardiovascular Health in Ireland and the European Society of Cardiology, and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists and the Academy for Healthcare science. She is a Visiting Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Ulster University and Honorary Research Consultant in NHS Lothian. Catherine is a non-executive director of the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, Northern Irelands largest health trust.

Catherine holds a number of senior leadership positions Nationally and Internationally. She is the current President of the Science Council, the awarding body of Chartership in Science, having previously held the role of Vice-Chair of the Board and Chair of the Policy Advisory Committee. She has previously served as the President of the Professional Body for Cardiac Scientists. Catherine is currently a Board member of the Association of Cardiovascular Nursing and Allied Professions within the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and is the Chair of Allied Professionals National Societies Committee and Chair of the European Society of Cardiology Taskforce on Allied Professionals. She represents Scotland on the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) Board and is a member of the International (IFMBE) scientific programme committee. In recognition of her work supporting women leaders has been an invited delegate for the UK UN Women delegation on the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Charles Richet

1850 - 1935

Year of election: 1918

Wikipedia Britannica

F J W Raughton

1899 - 1972

Year of election: 1971

Francis Peyton Rous

1879 - 1970

Year of election: 1944

Wikipedia Britannica

Frederick Stratten Russell

1897 - 1984

Year of election: 1963

Wikipedia

Harald Reuter

b. 1934

Year of election: 2014

Wikipedia The Academy of Europe

Ian Campbell Roddie

1928 - 2011

Year of election: 1989

Obituary

James Rothman

b. 1950

Year of election: 2014

Wikipedia Britannica Nobel Prize

Max Rubner

1854 - 1932

Year of election: 1929

Wikipedia

Nancy Rothwell

b. 1955

Year of election: 2008

Wikipedia Royal Society

Peter B Raven

b. 1940

Year of election: 2017

Raven biography APS Living History Interview University of North Texas news item

Peter J. Ratcliffe

Year of election: 2019

Nobel Prize

Peter J Ratcliffe, MD is a physician scientist who trained as a nephrologist, before founding the hypoxia biology laboratory at Oxford. His laboratory elucidated mechanisms by which human and animal cells sense oxygen levels and transduce these signals to direct adaptive changes in gene expression.

Ratcliffe received his degrees from the University of Cambridge and medical training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London and the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a recipient of several international awards for his laboratory’s work on oxygen sensing, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research. He was knighted for his services to medicine in 2014 and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019. In 2012 he gave The Physiological Society’s Annual Review Prize Lecture, in Edinburgh, with a lecture entitled “Oxygen sensing in animals”.

He holds appointments as Director of Clinical Research at the Francis Crick Institute and Director of the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford and is a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

Richard Ribchester

Year of election: 2020

University of Edinburgh

My formal introduction to The Physiological Society was in June 1976, at the Centenary Meeting in Cambridge: my oral communication was scheduled as the opener, C1. Since I was only a second-year PhD student at the time (under John Harris’s supervision at the muscular dystrophy labs in Newcastle) and the audience was peppered with many distinguished physiologists, this caused me quite some trepidation.

I obtained my PhD in 1977. After postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Physiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, under Bill Betz’s mentorship, and the Physiology Institute in Oslo, guided by Jan Jansen, I was appointed to a Lectureship in Physiology at the University of Edinburgh in 1980, where I have remained through my entire career, focusing my research (and teaching) on the physiology of neuromuscular junctions in health and disease.

I was elected to Ordinary Membership of The Society in 1983 and to the Editorial Board of The Journal of Physiology in 1986. I was one of the three appointed Distributing Editors from 1988 to 1991. In 1988, I wrote to the Treasurer of the Society (Julian Jack) suggesting that The Society might use some of its funds to support research seminar programmes in all UK Physiology Departments.

This idea was enthusiastically received by the Committee and I am pleased to see that the seminar support programme still continues to benefit the dissemination and discussion of physiology in this fashion. I served on the Committee myself from 1994-98. The University of Edinburgh awarded me a DSc in 2005 for my contributions to research on development and plasticity of neuromuscular innervation and I was promoted to a Personal Chair in Cellular Neuroscience the same year.

Over the period of 2006 – 2009, I worked closely with local philanthropists Donald and Euan MacDonald, and with the University, leading to the establishment of the Euan MacDonald Centre for motor neurone disease research, for which I acted as Director until a clinician-scientist was identified and appointed. The Centre now comprises over 200 researchers and its diverse basic, translational and clinical work is recognised internationally. I was elected as a Fellow Member of The Physiological Society in 2017. I feel indeed honoured by my election now as an Honorary Member. I am looking forward to continuing research as an experimental physiologist during my impending retirement, and to attendance and contribution to Society meetings, hopefully for many years to come.

Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

1852 - 1934

Year of election: 1931

Wikipedia Britannica

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

b. 1952

Year of election: 2012

Wikipedia Britannica Royal Society

William Albert Hugh Rushton

1901 - 1980

Year of election: 1973

Wikipedia

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