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March 2011 – Professor Luke Drury, Director of the School of Cosmic Physics, elected President of the Royal Irish Academy

luke drury

We are pleased to announce that Professor Luke Drury, Director of the School of Cosmic Physics, was elected President of the Royal Irish Academy on 16th March 2011. He is the 54th President of the Academy since it was established in 1785. He will be president for the next three years, succeeding Professor Nicholas Canny of NUI Galway.Professor Drury is a member of the Council of the Institute and Director of the School of Cosmic Physics. He is Senior Professor and Head of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Section within the School. He attended Wesley College, Dublin and won the Young Scientists Exhibition in 1969. He then studied experimental physics and pure mathematics at Trinity College Dublin where he won the gold medal for maths and the Fitzgerald Medal for physics before undertaking a PhD in astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, England.  Following this, he worked at the Max-Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany before returning to Dublin and joining the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1986. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1995.