UEA researcher wins professorship

University of East Anglia (UEA) researcher Prof Andrew Watson has been awarded one of six Royal Society 2010 anniversary research professorships.

The prestigious new posts have been created to celebrate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary. They are designed to help world-class scientists undertake groundbreaking research over the next ten years.

Previous holders of Royal Society research professorships include five Nobel Laureates and five Presidents of the Royal Society.

Prof Watson, of UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, studies the carbon cycle and its connection to climate change. In his new role, he will aim to improve our understanding of ‘carbon sinks’ and develop a model for the global accounting of the atmospheric CO2 budget.

Prof Watson said: “Our recent work has shown that the uptake of CO2 by the North Atlantic is very variable over periods of just a few years. We used commercial ships with CO2-measuring instrumentation to do this.

“If we had a global network of such ships, we could observe the changes in uptake of much of the ocean directly as it happens. One of the things I am hoping to achieve as a Royal Society Research Professor is set up such a network.”

The other research professorships go to Prof Jon Driver, Prof Andre Geim, Prof Timothy Gowers, Prof Timothy Palmer and Sir Andrew Wiles of Princeton University, who is most famous for proving Fermat's Last Theorem.