Warwick professor wins prize in both hemispheres

Sébastien Perrier, a Monash-Warwick Alliance joint professor, has won awards both in Australia and the UK in the past two months. 

The Royal Society awarded him the Wolfson Research Merit Award for his work with ‘molecular engineering’, which comes shortly after being awarded the 2013 Le Fèvre Memorial Prize by the Australian Academy of Science.

The Wolfson Research Merit Award is a scheme which helps UK universities to recruit or retain outstanding scientists to a permanent post through a salary enhancement for up to five years. This is paid by the university on top of the basic salary. It is jointly funded by the Royal Society and the Wolfson Foundation and is usually within the range of £10,000 to £30,000.

The Le Fèvre Memorial Prize is awarded to those who demonstrate outstanding basic research in chemistry by young researchers, up to 15 years after they have completed their PhD.

Professor Perrier completed his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2002. He has become one of the first joint research appointments by the Monash-Warwick Alliance, sharing time between the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick.

The Alliance aims to produce graduates with a global education. Professor Perrier’s teams work together on research projects, with researchers exchanging between the universities. The Warwick team focuses on the design of materials and the Monash team specialises in the use of these materials for medical purposes.

He currently leads a team of up to 20 researchers working on the design of state-of-the-art functional polymeric materials by manipulation of their molecular structure. These can be used for example for commercial products in the personal-care industry and in health and medicine, and his research also focuses on ensuring a low impact on the environment.

He has received other awards including the Macro Group UK Young Researcher Award (2006), the Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2009), the Rennie Memorial Medal (2009), and the David Sangster Polymer Science and Technology Award (2009).

Professor Perrier commented on the awards: “I am honoured to receive the prestigious Wolfson Research Merit award and to join the list of outstanding previous awardees.”

“I am particularly thrilled to have received both the Le Févre Memorial Prize and the Wolfson Research Merit award in the same academic year. The vision of the Alliance is to bring together great science from Warwick and Monash, and it is exciting to see polymer science being part of it.”

“I also want to take this opportunity to thank the many research students, postdoctoral researchers, mentors, colleagues and collaborators, whose contributions enables me to pursue inter-disciplinary and cutting-edge research.”

Professor Andrew Coats, Director of the Monash-Warwick Alliance said: ”This second award to Sébastien Perrier in such a short period and from the opposite ends of the world is both a dramatic tribute to his achievements and also a vivid marker of the impact the revolutionary Monash-Warwick Alliance is having on research impact.

The world’s first truly deep two University alliance is attracting high quality researchers and teachers with the ability to redefine what Universities can do to globalise their influence.”

The Woolfson Research Merit Award was also awarded to Professor Mohan Balasubramanian, who will now be joining the University of Warwick from the National University of Singapore to take up the awards position, which requires the recipient holds a permanent post at a university in the UK from the start of the award.

Now based at the Warwick Medical School, Professor Balasubramanian works on Cytokinetic actomyosin ring structure, assembly and function.