Professor Chennupati Jagadish AC PresAA FRS FREng FTSE – elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
Professor Melissa Little AC FAA FAHMS FRS – elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
Professor Bill Laurance FAA FRS – elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
Professor Hugh Possingham FAA FRS – elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
Professor Peter Corke FAA FTSE – received the 2025 Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Award from the Association for Advancing Automation
Professor Lidia Morawska FAA – awarded a Honoris Causa Doctorate from Lublin University of Technology
Professor Michael Tobar FAA FTSE – received the 2025 European Frequency and Time Award and the 2025 C.B. Sawyer Award from the Joint Conference of the IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium & European Frequency and Time Forum
19 Feburary 1931 to 16 May 2025
Professor Bill Compston was elected to the Academy in 1971 for his work in isotype geochemistry, isotopic age-dating and in developing geological and instrumental techniques for isotopic age-dating.
Professor Compston was born in Western Australia. He studied geology at the University of Western Australia, earning a BSc in 1951 and a PhD in 1957. In 1956 he gained a Fulbright scholarship to study at the California Institute of Technology, after which he returned to UWA as a lecturer in 1958 and set up a geochronology project.
In 1961 Professor Compston was appointed to the Department of Geophysics at the Australian National University, remaining at ANU for the rest of his career. In 1969 he was the principal investigator for a NASA project dating lunar rocks from the Apollo 11 mission. His team at ANU developed SHRIMP (Sensitive High Resolution Ion MicroProbe) in the 1970s and 1980s; SHRIMP allowed very small rock samples to be analysed for lead and uranium, without chemical processing. SHRIMP microprobes evolved in the following years and continue to be used worldwide.
He received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from UWA in 1988. He was made a Foreign Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Geological Science and received the Chinese Government Friendship Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987, and of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) in 1997. He was awarded the Mawson Medal and Lecture, and the Matthew Flinders Medal and Lecture in 1988, and the ATSE Clunies Ross Award in 1995. He received the Centenary Medal in 2001.
Professor Compston gave his time generously to the Academy. He was interviewed by David Salt for the Academy in 2005.
Alongside the many fascinating history of science articles published in our journal, Historical Records of Australian Science, we publish biographical memoirs – biographies of deceased Fellows commissioned by the Academy. We are very grateful to the authors who go to great lengths to make these articles as complete as possible.
Recent biographical memoirs:
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