Glittering prizes

John Lawton, director of the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College, has been awarded the Zoological Society of London's Frink Medal for British zoologists for 1998, for his contributions to ecological science and to science in public life.

Rifaat Ahmed Abdel Karim, visiting professor in the school of management studies for the service sector at Surrey University, has received the Islamic Financial Institutions' lifetime achievement award.

Ken Walton, fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and former head of the department of geology at the University of St Andrews, has been elected a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Science. He began collaborating with Polish geologists in 1958, after discovering rocks in Poland were formed in the same way as rocks in the ocean that once separated England from Scotland.

At the University of Cambridge, Alan Baker, professor in the department of pure mathematics and mathematical statistics, Peter Haynes, senior lecturer in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics, and Roger Needham, head of Microsoft research, have been elected to the membership of the Academia Europea, an international, non-governmental association of scientists and scholars that aims to promote learning, education and research.

Geneticist Alison Ross, from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne's department of human genetics, won the 1999 Max Perutz Essay Prize for an essay on her quest to find a gene for sacral agenesis, an inherited condition causing developmental abnormality in the spine.