Submitted by Debbie Birkett on Wed, 10/05/2023 - 14:23
We are absolutely delighted to congratulate Professor William Sutherland and Professor Chris Jiggins on being elected Fellows of the Royal Society.
Bill is one of the leading lights in conservation policy and practice, especially through the delivery of evidence-based conservation. He works with a team of collaborators, students and postdocs in Cambridge and an extensive network of global partners. He fully recognises that this award is a result of a collaborative effort and is deeply grateful to all who have worked with him.
In December he published the edited open access book Transforming Conservation: a practical guide to evidence and decision making, which provides a toolkit of means of delivering more effective policy and practice. This has already been downloaded over 10,000 times from a global mix of countries and is becoming widely used for teaching and practice both in conservation and much more widely.
On hearing of his election to the Fellowship Professor Sutherland said:
“I am deeply honoured and thrilled to be elected as a FRS. This builds on the remarkable strength of conservation within the Zoology Department and School of Biological Sciences and the work of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.”
He is currently the Miriam Rothschild Chair of Conservation Biology, a professorial fellow at St Catharine’s College and the Chair of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.
Chris Jiggins studies adaption and speciation in the Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). In particular he is interested in studying how species converge due to mimicry as a model for understanding the predictability of evolution and the genetic and ecological causes of speciation. He demonstrated the importance of hybridisation and movement of genes between species in generating novel adaptations. He also works on the agricultural pest cotton bollworm and carries out genomic studies of the insect bioconversion species, black soldier fly.
On hearing of his election to the Fellowship Professor Jiggins said:
"I am amazed and delighted to receive this honour, and would thank all the amazing students, and postdocs that I have been lucky enough to work with over the years .”
Photo: (Left) Professor William Sutherland, (Right) Professor Chris Jiggins