Prestigious new honours for Lister community members
27 May 2026 / Lister News Lister Institute Fellows Blog
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We celebrate several current and former Lister Fellows who have been elected as fellows of prestigious scientific societies the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences over the past week. Our warmest congratulations to each of them on their discoveries and leadership in fundamental and translational biomedical research.
New Fellows of the Royal Society
Two former Lister Fellows are among over 90 outstanding researchers from across the world to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences. They join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Dorothy Hodgkin.
“I am delighted to welcome this newest group of exceptional scientists to the Fellowship of the Royal Society,” said Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society. “Their contributions reflect the highest standards of scientific endeavour. Whether advancing our understanding of vaccines or exploring the transformative potential of mathematics and computation, their work exemplifies the enduring value of curiosity, creativity and rigorous inquiry.”
Professor Robert Klose FRS
University of Oxford
“
I was very lucky to have been awarded a Lister Prize at a pivotal time in my early independent career where I could leverage this generous support to explore new ideas and focus on the most important questions in the field. Today, as a result of this, I am honoured to be in the company of such outstanding scientists and deeply grateful for the support of my colleagues in the Department of Biochemistry at Oxford and Keble College. Most importantly, I am indebted to, and continually inspired by, the remarkable students, postdoctoral researchers, and collaborators who have made the pursuit of discovery such a joy.”
Rob was awarded the Lister Prize in 2011. His research focuses on the control of gene expression, chromatin and epigenetics, especially their role in cell differentiation and multicellular development. Rob and his colleagues study regions of our genome which lack DNA methylation, called CpG islands. The lab has worked out the role CpG islands play in chromatin modification and states that affect how cells are able maintain their normal gene expression programmes. Importantly, if CpG island reading systems are disrupted, this causes developmental defects and other human diseases, including cancer.
Professor Melina Schuh FRS
Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Germany
“
I feel deeply honoured and delighted to have been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. It is a very special recognition, and I feel extremely grateful to all the talented students, postdocs, collaborators, and mentors who have contributed to the work over the years.”
Melina’s long-term research goal is to identify and analyse mechanisms that lead to abnormal eggs and pregnancy loss in mammals. She won the Lister Prize in 2014 to support pioneering studies to understand human oocyte meiosis and she continues to study how errors arise during the meiotic divisions of mammalian eggs. Her team was the first to visualise how human eggs retrieved for IVF purposes develop and eliminate half of their DNA to prepare for fertilisation – a phenomenon that helped explain why IVF goes wrong in so many women and why fidelity declines specifically with maternal age. Melina founded Ovo Labs to develop novel therapeutics that act on different molecular mechanisms related to egg cell division. These therapeutics have the potential to increase IVF success rates by 20-30% for women below 35 and by 3-5 times for women aged 35-45, potentially the biggest improvement in infertility treatment since the introduction of IVF in 1978.
Melina says she is very grateful for how the Lister Institute support her at an important early stage of her independent career. “The Lister Prize provided not only financial support, but also a strong sense of encouragement and confidence at a time when building an independent research programme involved many uncertainties,” she remarks. “I have very fond memories of the Lister community and the inspiring interactions with fellow awardees across many different areas of biomedical research.”
New Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences
We are also delighted that four members of our community have been elected as new Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honour that recognises their outstanding contributions to advancing medical science, through discovery research, translational work and the application of scientific knowledge in ways that deliver tangible benefits for patients and the wider public.
Professor James Nathan
University of Cambridge
“
The Lister Prize Fellowship was instrumental in helping establish my lab's independent research programme, providing the freedom to pursue genuinely high-risk science at a critical early stage of my career. I am delighted that this work has now been recognised by election to the Academy of Medical Sciences.”
James received the Lister Prize in 2017. He spent his fellowship uncovering how cells sense and respond to changes in oxygen and nutrient levels – work inspired by his clinical experience as a respiratory physician. Using genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screens, his team identified ABHD11, a mitochondrial enzyme that controls cellular energy production and immune function. When ABHD11 is lost, cells accumulate a metabolite that directly blocks oxygen-sensing enzymes, a finding that connects mitochondrial metabolism to cellular oxygen responses with implications for diseases ranging from cancer to immune disorders. James also uncovered how cholesterol metabolism is linked to oxygen availability.
Read more about James’s research on the Cambridge Immunology Network
Professor James Lee
The Francis Crick Institute
“
It is a tremendous honour to have been elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. I'm fortunate to have a great team of scientists in my lab, and this accolade is testament to their hard work as well as to the patients and families who have kindly given us samples. Many aspects of our work are directly supported by my Lister Fellowship, which has made an invaluable contribution our research.”
James won a Lister Prize in 2021. His work looks at how tiny differences in DNA predispose people to inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. In 2024, his group published a paper in Nature that revealed a new biological pathway that plays a major role in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). By uncovering the biological mechanisms involved, his lab hopes to better understand these conditions and find new ways of treating them.
Associate Professor Nicky Whiffin
University of Oxford
“
I am delighted to be elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. This honour recognises the work of incredible team members past and present, whom it has been an absolute pleasure to work alongside, as well as many wonderful collaborators and mentors.”
Associate Professor Nicky Whiffin (Lister Prize 2024) wants to understand rare genetic disorders and find new diagnoses for patients. She particularly focuses on parts of DNA, called non-coding regions, that make up a large proportion of the genome, but remain understudied. She’s particularly known for leading the research which led to the discovery and characterisation of ReNU syndrome, a previously unexplained neurodevelopmental disorder.
ReNU is one of the first snRNA-mediated neurodevelopmental disorders to be recognised at scale. It was uncovered in collaboration with the Genomics England’s National Genomic Research Library and the 100,000 Genomes Project, demonstrating the power of linking rigorous analytics to national datasets. The genetic discoveries have already informed diagnoses for several children in the UK, providing long-awaited answers to families and, crucially, the impetus to create a community for support and advocacy. Nicky was named in The Sunday Times alternative honours for 2025, a list that celebrates “those whose good deeds in the past 12 months have either gone unnoticed or deserve a bit more celebration.”
“I am excited to join the Academy and look forward to opportunities to work with others in the fellowship to advocate for increased equity in genetic testing and awareness of non-coding causes of rare genetic disorders,” Nicky says. “This is a perfect complement to my current Lister fellowship, which aims to improve our ability to identify non-coding causes of rare disease in routine clinical care.”
Visit The Computational Rare Disease Genomics Lab
Sonia Gandhi
The Francis Crick Institute
Professor Sonia Gandhi is a member of our Scientific Committee which assesses and selects the annual Lister Prize Fellows, through an in-depth process involving numerous international experts to ensure that we fund researchers whose career can be significantly boosted with our support. Sonia leads a translational neuroscience programme focused on drug discovery for disease modification in neurological diseases, delivery of innovative clinical trials for disease modification, and developing predictive approaches for personalised medicine. Her laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute studies how and why proteins misfold and aggregate in Parkinson’s disease, and the downstream molecular consequences triggered by oligomerisation.
Follow Sonia's lab on X
