Honours
For his work on CFS, Wessely was awarded the Jean Hunter Prize in 1997 by the Royal College of Physicians and was co-winner of the John Maddox Prize 2012 sponsored by Nature and the Ralph Kohn Foundation, and organised by Sense About Science on whose advisory council he serves. The award is given to individuals who have promoted sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest, with an emphasis on those who have faced extreme difficulty or opposition in doing so, as Wessely has done in researching neuropsychiatric elements to CFS despite threats to his life. Some, however, have objected to this award being given to him due to concerns over the quality of his research.
To balance these criticisms academic supporters would point out that he was appointed as a Foundation Senior Investigator of the National Institute for Health Research, which is given on very strict criteria including analysis of metrics/citations. The college of NIHR Senior Investigators is drawn from the most pre-eminent NIHR-funded researchers selected through annual competitions. He was also elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the medical equivalent of the Royal Society, in 1999. Only 40 are honoured per year, and it is the highest honour and professional recognition in UK academic medical science.
His 2013 Knighthood was for services to Military healthcare and psychological medicine.
Read more about this topic: Simon Wessely
Famous quotes containing the word honours:
“Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelist honours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles rais’d by breath of Kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turn’d to that dirt from whence he sprung.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)