Lord May awarded Copley Medal

28 June 2007

Lord May OM AC FRS, Professor of Zoology at Oxford University, has been awarded the Royal Society’s Copley medal, the world’s oldest prize for scientific achievement.

Lord May, a professor in the Zoology Department and an Emeritus Fellow of Merton College, has been awarded the prize for his exceptional contributions to ecology and mathematics. He works on the factors influencing the diversity and abundance of plant and animal species and the rates, causes and consequences of extinction.

The Copley medal, the Royal Society’s highest honour, was first awarded in 1731, 170 years before the first Nobel Prize. It is awarded for outstanding achievements in scientific research and its previous recipients include Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. 

Beginning his career as a theoretical physicist, Lord May went on to apply mathematical techniques to the study of population biology and make major advances in this field. This research has clarified our understanding of the relation between the structure of an ecosystem and its ability to handle disturbance (whether natural or human-created). His studies of models proposed as descriptions for the behaviour of insect and fish populations were one of two strands that brought the new discipline of chaos centre-stage across the sciences in the 1970s (when his appointment as the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser was announced, one of the tabloids remarked: ‘The new chief scientist is an expert on chaos. He is about to discover he has a lot to learn.’) His later research has also reshaped our understanding of how to control infectious diseases in both humans and other animals.

Lord May has been Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government and head of the Office of Science and Technology (1995–2000) and President of the Royal Society (2000–5). He was appointed Knight Bachelor in 1996, a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1998, and a member of the Order of Merit in 2002. In 2001 he was created a life peer, Baron May of Oxford. He has been a professor at Oxford University since 1988.

Lord May said: ‘I am delighted to have won this award. I have been privileged to have had an immensely rewarding career in science, as a researcher, as chief scientific adviser to the UK Government and as a president of the Royal Society. Perhaps my only regret is that my research on species extinction is – unfortunately – even more relevant today than when I began.’