UBC Physicist, Evolutionary Biologist Honoured by UK's Royal Society

UBC theoretical physicist Ian Affleck and evolutionary biologist Loren Rieseberg have been elected to the United Kingdom's Royal Society. The UBC researchers are among 44 new fellows joining the ranks of the Society's elite membership this year, and among five elected from Canadian institutions.

Affleck has made numerous ground-breaking contributions across a wide range of theoretical physics. His early work on dynamical supersymmetry breaking and the Affleck-Dine mechanism for baryogenesis had strong impact on particle physics. In mathematical physics, he contributed to important results on valence-bond ground states in antiferromagnets.

The professor with the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Killam University Professor has authored seminal works in condensed matter theory applying field theoretic methods to systems of experimental relevance.

Rieseberg, professor with the Department of Botany and Canada Research Chair in Plant Evolutionary Genomics, has made fundamental contributions to society's understanding of speciation mechanisms and the evolution of local adaptation. He pioneered the application of experimental genomic approaches to studies of microevolutionary processes. He demonstrated that new diploid plant species arise through hybridization, that this mode of speciation results from significant ecological and karyotypic divergence, and that the process occurs with remarkable speed.

Rieseberg has also shown that new hybrid gene combinations facilitate the colonization of extreme environments indicating that hybridization provides a mechanism for major ecological and evolutionary transitions requiring simultaneous changes at multiple traits and genes.

Affleck and Rieseberg join eight other UBC Science members of the Royal Society.

The Fellowship of the Royal Society is composed of 1300 of the most distinguished scientists from the United Kingdom, other Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland. An independent academy promoting the natural and applied sciences, the Society has three roles--as the UK academy of science, as a learned Society, and as a funding agency.

Royal Society