Society Fellow, Professor Steven Simpson AC FRSN FRS FAA has been awarded one of the Australian Academy of Science’s two highest honours — the 2022 Macfarlane Burnet Medal and Lecture — for his research that has led to a groundbreaking approach to nutrition.

 Professor Stephen Simpson, from the University of Sydney, has revolutionised the scientific understanding of swarming in locusts, with research spanning neurochemical events in the brains of individual locusts to continental-scale mass migration. Together with colleague David Raubenheimer, he has also developed a powerfully integrative framework for nutrition called the Geometric Framework, which he devised and tested using insects. The Framework has since been applied to a wide range of organisms, from slime moulds to humans, and to problems from aquaculture and conservation biology, to dietary causes of human obesity and ageing. Since 2012, Professor Simpson has applied his biological and biomedical research and knowledge to ease the burden of chronic disease in humans through a unique, cross-disciplinary initiative at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.

The Council of the Royal Society of NSW warmly congratulates Professor Simpson on this great honour.