The Rank Prizes comprise the Rank Prize for Optoelectronics and the Rank Prize for Nutrition. The prizes recognise, reward and encourage researchers working in the respective fields of optoelectronics and nutrition.PDF
/ref> The prizes are funded by the charity The Rank Prize Funds, which were endowed by the industrialist, philanthropist and founder of the Rank Organisation,

J. Arthur Rank Joseph Arthur Rank, 1st Baron Rank (22 December 1888 – 29 March 1972) was a British industrialist who was head and founder of the Rank Organisation. Family business Rank was born on 22 or 23 December 1888 at Kingston upon Hull in England into ...

and his wife Nell, via the

Rank Foundation Joseph Arthur Rank, 1st Baron Rank (22 December 1888 – 29 March 1972) was a British industrialist who was head and founder of the Rank Organisation. Family business Rank was born on 22 or 23 December 1888 at Kingston upon Hull in England into ...

on 16 February 1972, not long before Arthur's death. The two Funds, the Human and Animal Nutrition and Crop Husbandry Fund and the Optoelectronics Fund, support sciences which reflect Rank's business interests through his "connection with the flour-milling and cinema and electronics industries", and which Rank believed would be of great benefit to humanity. The Rank Prize Funds also recognise, support and foster excellence among young and emerging researchers in the two fields of nutrition and optoelectronics. The Funds aim to advance and promote education and learning for public benefit.

Rank Prize for Optoelectronics

The Rank Prize for Optoelectronics supports, encourages, and rewards researchers working at the cutting edge of optoelectronics research, initially (from 1976) awarded annually, now a biennial prize worth £100,000. Optoelectronics relates to the interface between optics and electronics, and related phenomena. The Committee on Optoelectronics consists of the following people: * Donal Bradley CBE FRS (Chairman) *

Roberto Cipolla Roberto Cipolla (born 1963), , FREng, is a British researcher in computer vision and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Education Cipolla was born in Solihull, England and attended Langley School in Solih ...

FREng *Martin D. Dawson FRSE * Helen Gleeson OBE *Anya Hurlbert * Simon Laughlin FRS,

neurobiologist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, neural circuits, and glial c ...

John Mollon Professor John Dixon Mollon DSc FRS.
List of Fellows of the Royal Society (born September 12, 1944)

DSc FRS *

Miles Padgett Miles John Padgett (born 1 June 1963) is a Royal Society Research Professor of Optics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. He has held the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy since 2011 and served as Vice Princi ...

FRSE FRS *

Wilson Sibbett Wilson Sibbett (born 1948) is a British physicist noted for his work on ultrashort pulse lasers and Streak cameras. He is the Wardlaw Professor of Physics at St Andrews University. Early life and education He was born in Portglenone in County ...

CBE FRS FRSE * Maurice Skolnick FRS Past winners include: *1978 – Charles K. Kao *1982 –

C. Thomas Elliott Charles Thomas Elliott (known as Tom Elliott), (born 16 January 1939), is a scientist in the fields of narrow gap semiconductor and infrared detector research. Early life Hailing from County Durham, he attended Washington Grammar Technical S ...

*1982 –

Calvin Quate Calvin Forrest Quate (December 7, 1923 – July 6, 2019) was one of the inventors of the atomic force microscope. He was a professor emeritus of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Education He earned his bachelo ...

*1988 –

T. Peter Brody T. P. "Peter" Brody (18 April 1920 Budapest, Hungary – 18 September 2011 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States) was a British-naturalised physicist and the co-inventor of Active Matrix Thin-Film Transistor display technology together with F ...

*1991 – David N. Payne and William Alexander Gambling *1993 –

Arthur Ashkin Arthur Ashkin (September 2, 1922 – September 21, 2020) was an American scientist and Nobel laureate who worked at Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. Ashkin has been considered by many as the father of optical tweezers, "LaserFest – th ...

*1995 –

William Bradshaw Amos William Bradshaw Amos (born 1945) One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: is a British biologist, Emeritus Scientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biolo ...

*1998 –

Federico Capasso Federico Capasso (born 1949, Rome, Italy), a prominent applied physicist, was one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser during his work at Bell Laboratories. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University. He has co-authored over ...

*1998 – Isamu Akasaki,

Hiroshi Amano is a Japanese physicist, engineer and inventor specializing in the field of semiconductor technology. For his work he was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Isamu Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura for "the invention of efficient bl ...

and Shuji Nakamura *2006 - Charles H. Bennett,

Gilles Brassard Gilles Brassard, is a faculty member of the Université de Montréal, where he has been a Full Professor since 1988 and Canada Research Chair since 2001. Education and early life Brassard received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell Unive ...

and

Stephen Wiesner Stephen J. Wiesner (1942 – August 12, 2021) was an American-Israeli research physicist, inventor and construction laborer. As a graduate student at Columbia University in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he discovered several of the ...

*2006 - Paul Alivisatos *2008 – Mandyam Srinivasan *2008 –

Peter B. Denyer Peter Brian Denyer (27 April 1953 – 22 April 2010) was a British electronics engineer, academic, scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur who pioneered CMOS image sensor chips for many applications including mobile phones, webcams, video-conferenci ...

*2014 –

Alf Adams Alfred ("Alf") Rodney Adams, FRS (born 1939) is a British physicist who invented the strained-layer quantum-well laser. Most modern homes will have several of these devices in their homes in all types of electronic equipment. He served as a D ...

*2014 − Eli Yablonovitch *2018 – Jonathan C. Knight *2018 – Philip Russell *2018 – Tim Birks *2022 − Michael Graetzel and Nam-Gyu Park

Rank Prize for Nutrition

The Rank Prize for Nutrition is for research in human and

animal nutrition Animal nutrition focuses on the dietary nutrients needs of animals, primarily those in agriculture and food production, but also in zoos, aquariums, and wildlife management. Constituents of diet Macronutrients (excluding fiber and water) provide ...

(distinct from

animal husbandry Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, selective breeding, and the raising of livestock. Husbandry has a long history, starti ...

), and crop husbandry. The Committee on Nutrition consists of the following people: * John Mathers PhD Hon FAfN (Chairman) * Malcolm Bennett * Michael Gooding * Peter Gregory FRASE * Sarah Gurr * Anne-Marie Minihane * Susan Ozanne * Ann Prentice OBE PHD * John Wilding The Rank Prize for Nutrition was awarded at various intervals since 1976, but is now also awarded biennially, worth £100,000. In 2014 Australian biophysicist Graham Farquhar and the

CSIRO The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentar ...

agronomist Richard Richards were awarded the Rank Prize in Nutrition, for "pioneering the understanding of isotope discrimination in plants and its application to breed wheat varieties that use water more efficiently", which related to a discovery the pair made in the 1980s. Other winners include: *1981 −

Hugo Kortschak Hugo Kortschak (28 February 1884 – 19 September 1957) was an Austrian-born American violinist and a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1907 until 1914 (serving as assistant concertmaster from 1910 until 1914), founding member of the Be ...

, Marshall (Hal) Davidson Hatch and

Roger Slack Charles Roger Slack (22 April 1937 – 24 October 2016) was a British-born plant biologist and biochemist who lived and worked in Australia (1962–1970) and New Zealand (1970–2000). In 1966, jointly with Marshall Hatch, he discovered C4 phot ...

, for "outstanding work on the mechanism of photosynthesis which established the existence of an alternative pathway for the initial fixation of carbon dioxide in some important food plants". *1982 −

Hamish Munro Hamish Nisbet Munro FRSE (1915–1994) was a Scottish biochemist and expert in protein metabolism at Glasgow University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as president of the American Institute of Nutrition in 1978, and was firs ...

, for his work on the protein metabolism of

mammal Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or ...

s. *1984 −

Elsie Widdowson Elsie Widdowson (21 October 1906 – 14 June 2000), was a British dietitian and nutritionist. She and Dr Robert McCance, a pediatrician, physiologist, biochemist, and nutritionist, were responsible for overseeing the government-mandated additi ...

, for her work on the values of foods as nutrient sources, the effects of long-term undernutrition and starvation and the nature and control of the growth process. *1989 −

Vernon R. Young Vernon Robert Young (November 15, 1937 – March 30, 2004) was an expert on protein and amino acid requirements and researched how the human body processes nutrients into protein. Young was a principal organizer of amino acid Workshops sponsore ...

, for his work on the amino acid metabolism of man. *1992 − Kenneth Blaxter, lifetime award given posthumously. *1995 – Richard Smithells and B.M. Hibbard, for "pioneering studies into the role of

micronutrient Micronutrients are nutrient, essential dietary elements required by organisms in varying quantities throughout life to orchestrate a range of physiological functions to maintain health. Micronutrient requirements differ between organisms; for exam ...

deficiencies, principally folic acid deficiency, and neural tube defects". *2006 −

Charles H. Bennett (physicist) Charles Henry Bennett (born 1943) is a physicist, information theorist and IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applying quantum physics to the problem ...

and Stephen Wiesner for research on the original concept of quantum cryptography. *2010 − Peter E. Hartmann and

Robyn Owens Robyn Anne Owens is an Australian applied mathematician and computer scientist known for her research in computer vision and face recognition, and on the non-invasive imaging of lactation. Formerly a professor at the University of Western Austral ...

for their "research on human lactation, including methods for the non-invasive measurement of the rate of milk secretion". *2020 –

Stephen O'Rahilly Sir Stephen Patrick O'Rahilly (born 1 April 1958) is an Irish-British physician and scientist known for his research into the molecular pathogenesis of human obesity, insulin resistance and related metabolic and endocrine disorders. Education ...

*2022 –

Cathie Martin Catherine Rosemary Martin (born April 1955) is a Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of East Anglia and project leader at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, co-ordinating research into the relationship between diet and health and how cro ...

References

{{reflist Awards established in the 1970s Optoelectronics Nutrition