Glittering prizes

The University of the West of England has awarded honorary doctorates of engineering to John Taylor, director-general of research councils in the Department of Trade and Industry's Office of Science and Technology, James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, and Sue Lyons, director of manufacturing engineering at Rolls-Royce.

Ray Meddis, professor in the department of psychology at Essex University, has been elected a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America "for contribution to the modelling of auditory nerve cells and pitch perception".

Christopher Snowden, chair of microwave engineering at the University of Leeds, is to receive the Microwave Prize from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.

Lynne Macaskie, reader in the school of biological sciences at the University of Birmingham, has been awarded the Pounds 1,000 prize lectureship of the Society for General Microbiology for her contribution to the application of microbiology to waste remediation.