Fellow of the Royal Society
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science".[1]
Fellowship of the Society, the oldest known scientific academy in continuous existence, is a significant honour. It has been awarded to many eminent scientists throughout history, including Isaac Newton (1672),[2] Benjamin Franklin (1756), Charles Babbage (1816),[2] Michael Faraday (1824),[2] Charles Darwin (1839),[2] Ernest Rutherford (1903),[3] Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918),[4] Albert Einstein (1921),[5] Paul Dirac (1930), Winston Churchill (1941), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944),[6] Dorothy Hodgkin (1947),[7] Alan Turing (1951),[8] Lise Meitner (1955)[9] and Francis Crick (1959).[10][11] More recently, fellowship has been awarded to Stephen Hawking (1974), David Attenborough (1983), Tim Hunt (1991), Elizabeth Blackburn (1992), Raghunath Mashelkar (1998), Tim Berners-Lee (2001), Venki Ramakrishnan (2003), Atta-ur-Rahman (2006),[12] Andre Geim (2007),[13] James Dyson (2015), Ajay Kumar Sood (2015), Subhash Khot (2017), Elon Musk (2018),[14] Elaine Fuchs (2019) and around 8,000 others in total,[2] including over 280 Nobel Laureates since 1900. As of October 2018, there are approximately 1,689 living Fellows, Foreign and Honorary Members, of whom 85 are Nobel Laureates.[15]
Fellowship of the Royal Society has been described by The Guardian as "the equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar"[16] with several institutions celebrating their announcement each year.[17][18][19][20][21][22][23]
In addition to the main fellowships of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS & HonFRS), other fellowships are available which are applied for by individuals, rather than through election. These fellowships are research grant awards and holders are known as Royal Society Research Fellows.[49]
In addition to the award of Fellowship (FRS, HonFRS & ForMemRS) and the Research Fellowships described above, several other awards, lectures and medals of the Royal Society are also given.