Sir Andre Geim wins Copley Medal for discovery of graphene

25 July 2013

The Royal Society has awarded Sir Andre Geim FRS of Manchester University the Copley Medal for his contributions to science and in particular his work on graphene.

Graphene was discovered at the University of Manchester in 2004 and has since been found to have many applications, ranging from flexible electronic screens or "e-paper" to drug delivery and regenerative medicine.

Geim’s collaborator at the University of Manchester, Professor Sir Konstantin Novoselov, receives the Royal Society’s Leverhulme Medal this year. The two shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010.

Geim and Novoselov have published numerous research papers demonstrating the many applications of graphene including ultrafast transistors just one atom thick — making it a potential successor to silicon — and sensors that can detect just a single molecule of a toxic gas.

The Copley medal is believed to be the world's oldest scientific prize. It was first awarded by the Royal Society in 1731, 170 years before the first Nobel Prize and has been awarded to such eminent scientists as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Other winners include:

Sir Walter Bodmer FRS, Royal Medal, for seminal contributions to population genetics, gene mapping and understanding of familial genetic disease.

Professor Peter Wells FRS, Royal Medal, for pioneering the application of the physical and engineering sciences to the development of ultrasonics as a diagnostic and surgical tool which has revolutionised clinical practice.

Professor Christofer Toumazou FREng FRS, Gabor Medal, for his success in applying semiconductor technology to biomedical and life-science applications, most recently to DNA analysis.

Professor Douglas Higgs FRS, Buchanan Medal, for his seminal work on the regulation of the human alpha-globin gene cluster and the role of the ATRX protein in genetic disease.

The full list of Royal Society award winners is at http://royalsociety.org/awards/medallists/2013/