University of Birmingham academics awarded Philip Leverhulme Prizes

Professor Sam Giles, in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Dr Cathy Manning, an associate professor in the School of Psychology, have both been recognised by the Trust as outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition, and whose future careers are exceptionally promising.

The Trust’s Philip Leverhulme Prize scheme commemorates the contribution to the work of the Trust made by Philip, Third Viscount Leverhulme and grandson of William Lever, the founder of the Trust. The Trust awards just 30 of these prizes each year, worth £100,000 each. The fund may be used for any purpose that advances the prize winner’s research.

Sam will use the funding provided by the Prize to further her research into the early evolutionary history of ray-finned fishes, which today account for over half of all living vertebrates. She will use X-ray scanning of fossils and ‘virtual’ dissection of these CT scans to investigate the origin of the ray-finned fish brain—which can be preserved in 300 million year old fossils!—and other anatomical innovations leading to their evolutionary success.

Cathy will use her funding to continue research into perceptual decision-making abilities among children. Previous work has shown how, as children get older, they pick up evidence quicker and make decisions less cautiously in visual motion tasks, although evidence accumulation is reduced in dyslexic children. By better understanding the considerable variability between individuals, Cathy expects to gain important insights into children’s developmental processes.

Professor Anna Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, said: “Now in its twenty-third year, this scheme continues to attract applications from extraordinarily high calibre researchers. Selecting only thirty winners gets more challenging each year, and we are immensely grateful to the reviewers and panel members who helped us in our decision-making.

“This year, the Trust has awarded prizes to academics working on an impressive breadth of topics, from ancient linguistics to the macroevolution of fossil fishes, cross-cultural diversity in learning to fashion and sustainability, political anthropology of the Middle East to climate physics. We are incredibly proud to support these researchers through the next stage of their careers.”