Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre elected as Fellow of the Royal Society
27 May 2026
Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, Professor Tom Mrsic-Flogel, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society for his pioneering work in neuroscience. Announced today (May 27), he is among 90 outstanding researchers and innovators from around the world recognised this year by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences. The Fellowship is a testament to his leadership, talent and the impact of his research in advancing our understanding of the brain.
He joins the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein in supporting the Society’s mission of championing excellence in research and science for the benefit of humanity. The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre congratulates Professor Mrsic-Flogel on this well-deserved recognition.
Professor Tom Mrsic-Flogel became Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in 2016, leading the Centre’s mission to understand how the brain drives behaviour. His work addresses a fundamental question: how does the brain combine sensory information with prior experience to perceive the world and guide adaptive behaviour? His research revealed that the structure of the sensory world is reflected in the specificity of synaptic connections between cortical neurons, establishing key principles of the circuit architecture that supports perception and inference. More recently, he has used large-scale approaches for recording and perturbing neural activity to study how computations within and across brain regions contribute to decision-making, working memory and flexible behaviour, working toward a mechanistic understanding of cognition at the whole-brain level.
“I am honoured to become a Fellow of the Royal Society. Making discoveries in neuroscience is a big challenge and requires a team effort, and so this honour is shared with all my lab members and collaborators. Now more than ever, the Royal Society has a vital role, as a collective voice for championing science and injecting reason into the public discourse. I look forward to contributing to this endeavour.”
Professor Tom Mrsic-Flogel FRS, Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL.
More information
About the Royal Society
The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Its Foreign Members are drawn from the rest of the world. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process based on excellence in science. Each candidate is considered on his or her own merits and can be proposed from any sector of the scientific community. Every effort is made to encourage nominations of women candidates and candidates from the emerging disciplines.
