Biology Professor awarded Weldon Prize

Professor Russell S. Lande, a Royal Society researcher from the Division of Biology at Imperial, has been awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize for 2010. The prize, known as the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal, is awarded annually by the University of Oxford and is named in honor of Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, a former professor of Zoology at Oxford.

The prize is defined to be awarded “without regard to nationality or membership of any University to the person who, in the judgement of the electors, has, in the ten years next preceding the date of the award, published the most noteworthy contribution to the development of mathematical or statistical methods applied to problems in Biology.” The award is open to biological fields of study, such as zoology, botany, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and medical science.

Delighted to receive the award, Professor Lande commented: “I am especially pleased to be awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize medal because much of my research concerns evolution of quantitative traits (such as body size and shape) which Weldon also studied. It is a great honour to join the previous recipients including Karl Pearson who pioneered modern statistics motivated to a large extent by Weldon, and Sir Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright who founded population genetics and the modern synthetic theory of evolution.”

“These people have long been my intellectual heroes”, Professor Lande added. The award, established through the efforts of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, although intended to be handed out annually, is often given less frequently.