TCD Professor Appointed Vice President and Physical Sciences Secretary of Royal Society

Posted on: 17 December 2009

Professor John Pethica, School of Physics and Principal Investigator in CRANN, has been appointed Physical Sciences Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society. The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence and has been at the forefront of enquiry and discovery since its foundation in 1660.  Next year marks the Society’s 350th anniversary.

Professor Pethica is an SFI Professor of Physics and visiting Professor at Oxford University. In 2001, he was one of the first ten recipients of a SFI Principal Investigator award.

Professor Pethica becomes the first Secretary of the Royal Society to have worked in Ireland for almost a century (the last being Joseph Larmor in 1912). He has been a Fellow since 1999. There are currently six Fellows resident in Ireland.

The Royal Society, the national academy of science of the UK and the Commonwealth, is at the cutting edge of scientific progress. It supports many top young scientists, engineers and technologists, influences science policy, debates scientific issues with the public and much more.