Old notices
These pages collect together notices posted on the IUCr web site in past years. They are retained for archival interest, but there is no guarantee (or likelihood) that many of the web links found in these notices will still be active.
New Fellow of the Royal Society
![[professor bill david]](https://www.iucr.org/__data/assets/image/0017/121355/professor-bill-david.jpg "Professor Bill David")
William David, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in the Department of Chemistry, has achieved the distinction of being elected Fellow of the world’s most eminent and oldest scientific academy in continuous existence: the Royal Society, founded in 1660. There are approximately 1600 Fellows and Foreign Members, of the Royal Society, including around 80 Nobel Laureates. Each year up to 52 Fellows and 10 Foreign Members are elected from a group of 700 candidates who are proposed by the existing Fellowship.
Professor William David FRS has a long history with the International Union of Crystallography and our current Vice President of the International Union of Crystallography Professor Mike Glazer recounts his personal story of Professor David’s achievements.
“When I arrived in Oxford in 1976 having come from Cambridge with my research group I was presented with an Oxford student to join us, this was Bill David, who had completed his Degree in Physics. I set him to work in the field of ferroelasticity in crystals. Once he had settled into the project he took the subject to heart and began to come up with a series of new ideas which later formed the basis for several publications. We worked together on a number of experiments but eventually Bill's prodigious ability and understanding of his research topic showed that he was an excellent and independent researcher. His D Phil thesis in the end consisted of two extremely fat volumes for which his internal examiner never forgave me! About ten landmark papers came out of this work. After leaving us he went to work at ISIS where he quickly established his reputation working mainly in powder diffraction. He was one of the first to work on the structures of high temperature superconductors and the famous Buckyballs. He has gone on to a post in the Oxford Chemistry Department where he has been working on the crystallography of hydrogen storage materials. Gifted both as an experimentalist and theoretician, he is truly an all-round scientist who well deserves his Fellowship of the Royal Society”.
A list of Professor David’s papers published by the IUCr can be found here.
