Awards

2003 Pilkington prizes

Ten members of staff have been recognised for their excellence in teaching at the annual Pilkington Teaching Prizes. The winners are:

Mr Tim Winter, Sheikh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies, Faculty of Divinity (Pembroke); Dr Eric Griffiths, University Lecturer, Faculty of English (Trinity); Dr David Summers, University Senior Lecturer, Department of Genetics (Gonville & Caius); Dr Josh Slater, Senior Lecturer in Equine Medicine, Department of Clinical Veterinary Medicine (Girton); Dr Albertina Albors-Llorens, University Lecturer, Faculty of Law (Girton College); Professor Geoffrey Hawthorn, Professor of International Politics, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (Clare Hall); Dr David Green, University Lecturer, Department of Physics (Churchill College); Dr Imre Leader, Reader in Pure Mathematics, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (Trinity); Dr Geoffrey Parks, University Lecturer in Nuclear Engineering, Department of Engineering (Jesus College); Professor Lawrence Paulson, Professor of Computational Logic, The Computer Laboratory (Clare College).

Set up by the late Sir Alastair Pilkington, Chairman of the Cambridge Foundation, the prizes are awarded each year to academic or academic-related staff who have distinguished themselves in teaching. The prize-giving event was supported by Cambridge University Press.

Silver medal

Andy Hopper FREng, Professor of Communication Engineering, has won a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for his excellent record of developing and commercialising new computing technologies.

The Academy said that the award recognises "his outstanding research exploitation characterised by imaginative innovation followed through to practical realisation: this has led to industrial exploitation, including some 10 successful start-up operations."

Professor Hopper has founded or co-founded ten start-up companies, including Acorn Computers Ltd, where he was Research Director. After the success of its BBC Microcomputer, Acorn spawned the world-leading chip company ARM. Other successful ventures have included Virata Corporation and Cambridge Broadband Ltd. Professor Hopper received his medal at the Academy Awards Dinner in London on Thursday 5 June.

Professor Hopper is currently excited about one of his newest spin-offs, RealVNC Ltd, formed last year to develop remote control software for desktop PCs. ""This one is really going against the trend," he says, "we're going back to the old-fashioned idea of dumb terminals, which carry only graphics, linked to a central computer that does the hard work. It burns bandwidth passing all the instructions and graphics up and down the line but the trade-off is much simpler programming." Five million users have downloaded over 15 million licences for RealVNC from its open source on the web. "We're exporting British engineering to a huge number of people all over the world, in its own field this is revolutionary technology but we run it with three lads in an office in Cambridge."

Other awards

Three members of staff were elected Fellows of the British Academy in July. They are Professor G I Davies (Theology), Professor Bob Hepple (Law) and Professor D J Ibbetson (Law).

At a ceremony in Moscow on 27 March 2003 Professor Anthony Cross of the Department of Slavonic Studies was awarded the Princess Ekaterina Dashkova Medal for 'services to freedom and enlightenment'. This was the forty-first time the medal had been awarded since its creation in 1991 but the first time to a non-Russian.

Dr Onora O'Neill, Principal of Newnham College has been elected a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society. Founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, the APS is the oldest learned society in the United States devoted to the advancement of scientific and scholarly enquiry.

Professor Mark Warner has been awarded the 2003 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize for the discovery of new phases of polymer liquid crystal elastomers and the experimental and theoretical studies of their extraordinary properties. The award was made jointly with Professor H Finkelmann. This is a very prestigious prize in the area of condensed matter physics and is awarded by the European Physical Society.

Professors Lynn Gladden and Malcolm Mackley of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Cambridge University, have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).