The William Gaskell Medal was awarded annually by the Royal Meteorological Society to a scientist who has distinguished himself in the field of experimental meteorology.
The medal was named in honour of Dr William Gaskell, a meteorologist who was killed along with 3 colleagues on a research flight to study microphysical and electrical properties in supercooled clouds on 2 March 1980. It is funded by the Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).
Dr William Gaskell was born in Bolton, UK on 17 December 1946 and was a research scientist at the Desert Research Institute. He obtained his Ph.D from UMIST in 1979 for his thesis on 'Field and Laboratory Studies of Precipitation Charges'. It was later accepted for publication in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
The Medal was first presented in 1981 to Peter Ryder of the Meteorological Office. Recipients were asked to deliver the William Gaskell Memorial Lecture to the society.
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010.
The Royal Meteorological Society is a long-established institution that promotes academic and public engagement in weather and climate science. Fellows of the Society must possess relevant qualifications, but Associate Fellows can be lay enthusiasts. Its Quarterly Journal is one of the world's leading sources of original research in the atmospheric sciences.
Sir John Theodore Houghton was a Welsh atmospheric physicist who was the co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) scientific assessment working group which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with Al Gore. He was the lead editor of first three IPCC reports. He was professor in atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford, former Director General at the Met Office and founder of the Hadley Centre.
Carlos Silvestre Frenk, is a Mexican-British cosmologist and the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University. His main interests lie in the field of cosmology, galaxy formation and computer simulations of cosmic structure formation.
Richard Henderson is a Scottish molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank.
Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain, known professionally as Ignacio Cirac, is a Spanish physicist. He is one of the pioneers of the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research.
Sir Basil John Mason was an expert on cloud physics and former Director-General of the Meteorological Office from 1965 to 1983 and Chancellor of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) from 1994 to 1996.
Susan Solomon is an atmospheric chemist, working for most of her career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 2011, Solomon joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she serves as the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Climate Science. Solomon, with her colleagues, was the first to propose the chlorofluorocarbon free radical reaction mechanism that is the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole.
Sir John James Skehel, is a British virologist and Emeritus scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. From 1987 to 2006 he was Director of the National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) at Mill Hill which was incorporated into the Crick Institute in 2016.
John Charles Marshall, FRS is a British oceanographer and academic. He is the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also an Adjunct Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University.
The Symons Gold Medal is awarded biennially by the Royal Meteorological Society for distinguished work in the field of meteorological science.
The Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize is awarded annually by the Institute of Physics to recognise leadership in the field of physics. It was established in 1966 and named in honour of Sir Richard T. Glazebrook, the first president of the Institute of Physics. It was originally a silver medal with a £250 prize.
Peter John Webster is a meteorologist and climate dynamicist relating to the dynamics of large-scale coupled ocean-atmosphere systems of the tropics, notably the Asian monsoon. Webster holds degrees in applied physics, mathematics and meteorology. Webster studies the basic dynamics of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system in the tropics and has applied this basic knowledge to developing warning systems for extreme weather events in Asia. He has served on a number of prestigious national and international committees including the World Climate Research Program’s Joint Scientific Committee (1983-1987), chaired the international Tropical Ocean Global Atmospheric (TOGA) organizing committee (1988-94) and was co-organizer of the multinational TOGA Couple Ocean-Atmosphere (1993). He is Emeritus Professor in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology and co-founder and Chief Scientist of Climate Forecast Applications Network LLC, a weather and climate services company.