University of Leeds academics have won the following prizes: Richard Smithells , emeritus professor of paediatrics, has won the Kennedy Foundation's International Award for Scientific Achievement for his work on the role of folic acid in preventing neural tube defects; Babatunde Gbolade , director of the fertility control unit at St James University Hospital, has been elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland ; Anthony F. Johnson has received the Swinburne Award from the Institute of Materials for work on tailored polymer structures and composites; the Royal Society of Chemistry has made Mike Pilling its John Jeyes lecturer for 2000-01 for his work in atmospheric chemistry, mechanistic modelling and science strategy.
The University of Newcastle upon Tyne has awarded the Robinson Prize in Cosmology to Alan Guth from the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his work on inflationary cosmology.
Steve Molyneux of the University of Wolverhampton has won the World Open Learning Conference and Exhibition Award for outstanding personal contribution to the open-learning industry. Robert Bickers , lecturer in historical studies at the University of Bristol, is the winner of the Institute of Historical Research Prize 2000 for his book proposal Empire Made Me about Maurice Tinkler, an Englishman who joined the Shanghai Municipal Police and was killed by Japanese soldiers in 1939.