Kevin Foster and Stuart Russell elected Fellows of the Royal Society

The Royal Society has a rich historical connection to Wadham; the College became the regular meeting place for the nucleus of experimenters who after 1660 became the Royal Society. Now those ties are even stronger as Wadham's Professorial Fellow in Microbiology, Kevin Foster, and alumnus and Honorary Fellow, Stuart Russell (Physics, 1979), have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society.

Professor Foster combines his unique background in maths, ecology, evolution and microbiology to study microbial communities. He is particularly interested in bacterial competition, and has applied the logic of ecology and evolution to microbiology. His flagship study pioneers the use of ecological principles rooted in nutrient competition and bacterial genomes to predict which sets of gut bacterial will limit the growth of important bacterial pathogens.

After successful postdocs in Texas, Berlin and Helsinki, Professor Foster started his own group at Harvard University with a prestigious Bauer Fellowship in 2006. He then relocated to Oxford, where he was a professor of evolutionary biology in the Departments of Biology and Biochemistry until his appointment to the Chair of Microbiology at the Dunn School, in association with Wadham, in 2024.

“I am delighted to join the ranks of the Royal Society”, said Prof Foster “This was only possible because of the talent and achievements of past and present group members, and I am very grateful to them.”

Professor Stuart Russell OBE FRS, works in the field of artificial intelligence. He studied Physics at Wadham and Computer Science at Stanford before joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. He is also a Professor of Computational Precision Health at the University of California, San Francisco and an Honorary Fellow of Wadham.

Professor Russell's research contributions include algorithmic and theoretical foundations for bounded rationality, real-time decision making, inverse reinforcement learning, hierarchical planning and reinforcement learning, and the unification of probability and logic. He has developed a new monitoring system for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Professor Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of the standard text in AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. He received the OBE in 2021 and delivered the BBC Reith Lectures and is a valued member of the Wadham community.

Our Warden, Robert Hannigan, comments: “This is a richly deserved award recognising Stuart Russell’s pioneering work. Everyone at Wadham is delighted and proud of our Honorary Fellow.”

Congratulations to Professor Foster and Professor Russell, and all the exceptional scientists who are newly-elected Fellows of the Royal Society.