The following faculty have been promoted to professorships: Dr Jane Cowan (Social Anthropology), Dr Andrew Crozier (English), Dr Brian Cummings (English), Dr Sue Hartley (Ecology), Dr Laura Marcus (English), Dr Vladimiro Sassone (Informatics), Dr Mary Stuart (Continuing Education), Dr Paul Taggart (Politics), Dr Richard Wilson (Social Anthropology) and Dr Dek Woolfson (Biochemistry).

The Queen's Birthday Honours last month brought a knighthood for Professor Anthony Leggett, who conducted his Nobel Prize-winning physics research at Sussex in the 1970s; a CBE for Gavin Henderson, principal of Trinity College of Music (one of the University's partner colleges); and an OBE for Robin Baker, director of Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication (another partner college).

The Royal Society has awarded Dr Diana McCarthy a four-year Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship to continue her research in the Natural Language Processing group within the Department of Informatics. Competition for these fellowships, which offer scientists and engineers a first step to an independent research career, is fierce as only 10 are awarded each year.

During the fellowship, Diana will develop further some techniques that she has recently devised to allow computers to automatically learn information about words and their meanings from large samples of human language.

Emeritus Professor Roger Taylor has been appointed as both Visiting Professor and Honorary Director of Fullerene Research at Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, China.