Professor Vikram Deshpande appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society

Professor Vikram Deshpande has been named as one of 62 new Fellows and Foreign Members elected to the Royal Society (29 April 2020).

Professor of Materials Engineering in the Department of Engineering, Vikram Deshpande is a leading authority in the newly emerging area of microstructural mechanics. His contributions in the field range from the design of micro-architectured materials to modelling soft and active materials.

He developed ‘metallic wood’, which are sheets of nickel as strong as titanium, but four-times lighter due to their plant-like nanoscale pores.

Vikram Deshpande was admitted as a Pembroke Fellow in 1999. He has won a number of international awards for his work, including the 2020 Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics.

Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society, said: “At this time of global crisis, the importance of scientific thinking, and the medicines, technologies and insights it delivers, has never been clearer. Our Fellows and Foreign Members are central to the mission of the Royal Society, to use science for the benefit of humanity.

"While election to the Fellowship is a recognition of exceptional individual contributions to the sciences, it is also a network of expertise that can be drawn on to address issues of societal, and global significance. This year’s Fellows and Foreign Members have helped shape the 21st century through their work at the cutting-edge of fields from human genomics, to climate science and machine learning. 

"It gives me great pleasure to celebrate these achievements, and those yet to come, and welcome them into the ranks of the Royal Society.”

Founded in the 1660s, The Royal Society’s fundamental purpose is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.  It is a self-governing Fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Its Foreign Members are drawn from the rest of the world. The Society’s fundamental purpose is to recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

The Royal Society's profile of Professor Vikram Deshpande FRS.

Image: The entrance to the Royal Society by Tom Morris