Glittering prizes

Cherie Booth QC has been made chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University. The university is also to confer honorary fellowships on Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the hospice movement, and Mary McAleese, president of Ireland.

A four-man team of engineers has won the Royal Society Esso Energy Award for 1998 for their work in significantly increasing energy extraction from oil wells. They are: Mir Mahmood Sarshar, Emil Gyorgy Arato, Wai Lam Loh and Najam A. Beg from Caltec, the oil and gas technology division of the British Hydromechanics Research Association.

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey, former minister for overseas development, has received an honorary fellowship from Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.

Also awarded fellowships by the university are the Hon Peter Caruana, Gibraltar's chief minister since 1996, and Anderson Dunn, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Gillian Bates, senior lecturer in molecular genetics at GKT Medical School, King's College, London, and Stephen Davies, reader in anatomy and developmental biology at University College, London, have been awarded the 1998 Royal Society Glaxo Wellcome Prize for original contributions to medical and veterinary sciences for their discoveries about the causes of Huntington's chorea. The winners will deliver a lecture associated with the award at the Royal Society on November 11.