The Society is delighted to recognise the experience, commitment and contributions of distinguished members by appointing our 2022 Fellow Members, as well as awarding our Exemplary Service to The Society Award. These accolades will be celebrated at the 2022 Member Forum, held at The Royal Society in London on 2 December 2022.
Exemplary Service to The Society Award
The Society would also like to congratulate Professor Ian Forsythe (University of Leicester, Leicester, UK) on receiving the Exemplary Service to The Society Award for his dedicated service to The Journal of Physiology and enthusiastic support of The Society over many years. Professor Forsythe will receive a statue of The Society’s mascot (the dog) at the 2022 Member Forum at The Royal Society on Friday 2 December 2022.
Professor Ian D. Forsythe did a BSc in Physiology & Biochemistry at Southampton University. He continued in the Department of Neurophysiology, with a PhD on presynaptic inhibition; setting up one of the early in vitro spinal cord preparations, under the supervision of Gerald Kerkut and Jeff Bagust. Two postdocs were spent abroad, first with Steve Redman at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (Canberra, Australia) and then with Phil Nelson and Gary Westbrook at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH (Bethesda, MD USA). He returned to the University of Leicester for a third postdoc with Peter Stanfield, before receiving a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Sciences in 1990. Ian was inducted into the rigours of poster presentation at The Physiological Society in 1981 and into reviewing for The Journal of Physiology by Nick Standen. His research interest in the synapse and voltage-gated potassium channels led to his development of patch recording from the calyx of Held giant synapse, as a model excitatory synapse and to explore the molecular and cellular mechanisms of brainstem auditory processing. He gave the Society’s GL Brown Prize Lectures on this topic in 1998. Ian was appointed as Professor of Neuroscience in the Dept Cell Physiology & Pharmacology (CPP) at Leicester from 2000, and moved to the MRC Toxicology Unit in 2005, as a Group Leader. He returned to CPP in 2011 and joined the Department of Neuroscience, Psychology & Behaviour (NPB) at its inception in 2015. Ian was Head of Department from 2018 to 2021, and is currently Emeritus Professor of Neurophysiology in NPB, with Guest Residency at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Graduate School of Systemic Neuroscience, Munich, Germany. He served on the Editorial Board of The Journal of Physiology, as Reviewing Editor (1995-2002), and then returned as Senior Editor (2010-2016) for Reviews/Invited Content (2010-2016; 2019-2022) and as Deputy Editor-in-Chief (2016-2022).
2022 Fellow Members:
Fellow Membership is The Physiological Society’s senior category of membership and recognises the experience, commitment and contributions of distinguished members. The Society’s Fellows have the opportunity to act as an ambassador to inspire and enthuse the next generation to study, work and excel in physiology to ensure physiology is flourishing. It also offers the opportunity for Fellows to connect and collaborate with the Fellowship community. The following members will be made Fellow Members in 2022:
- Professor James Duffin, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Professor Ian Forsythe, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
- Dr Michael Gray, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
- Professor Stephen Harridge, King’s College London, London, UK
- Professor Philip Jakeman, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
- Professor David Sheppard, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
- Professor Michael Taggart, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK