Physicist Sriram Ramaswamy, Director of TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences, Hyderabad, has been elected as the Fellow of The Royal Society. His name appeared on the list of 50 new fellows and 10 new Foreign Members announced by the Royal Society. Besides, biochemist Ramanujan Hegde, MRC Laboratory of Microbiology, U.K. and applied mathematician Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, Harvard University, are the other two Indian names who were also elected as the fellows of the premier scientific academy of the U.K. and the Commonwealth.

Sriram directs the TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad, and is on leave from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research helped found the field of Active Matter, which studies the collective behaviour of objects, such as motile organisms.

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan’s work attempts to understand the geometrical and dynamical patterns of shape and flow in physical and biological matter. His work has been recognized by awards that include the Edgerton Prize at MIT and the Ledlie Prize at Harvard.

Ramanujan Hegde is a biochemist whose research has deepened humans’ understanding of how newly made proteins are localised correctly inside cells.

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science. The current Royal Society President is Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who took up the post on 30 November 2015.