Two Directors of Oxford Martin School programmes have been elected to the Royal Society as Fellows this year.

Professor Oliver Pybus, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics, becomes a Fellow for his internationally renowned leadership in the field of phylodynamics. Professor Pybus invented key tools for inferring population dynamics from gene sequences and demonstrated that important epidemiological parameters can be estimated from pathogen genomes. He has repeatedly provided conceptual and empirical insights into pathogen dynamics that were unavailable from the analysis of traditional epidemiological data.

Professor Ros Rickaby, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Monitoring Ocean Ecosystems, is named a Fellow at the Royal Society for her research on the interactions between life and the composition of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Using an innovative combination of geochemical, microbiological, and genomic approaches, Professor Rickaby’s highly original research uses the past to understand ocean oxygenation, the biological response to ocean acidification, the critical role of metal-bearing-enzymes in the ocean, and the role of alkalinity in driving atmospheric CO2 and climate change.

The School congratulates both on this recognition of their outstanding contribution to their scientific fields.