Professor Brian Foster, European Regional Director for the International Linear Collider and head of the Department of Particle Physics at Oxford University, has today been elected Fellow of the Royal Society for his leadership in the development of particle accelerators and detectors. The Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences and one of the world's leading and most respected scientific academies, elects 44 Fellows to its ranks every year from all fields of science. Among past and present Fellows are Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford and Stephen Hawking.

"I am deeply honoured to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. I feel that it also represents a welcome recognition from the UK's premier science organisation of the importance of the International Linear Collider to the future of particle physics," said Foster.

As European Director for the International Linear Collider (ILC), Brian Foster is part of the core management for the planned particle accelerator, the next major project that will complement results from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, due to start running later this year. Foster is head of the Department of Particle Physics at Oxford University, former chairman of the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) and former member of the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. He used to be spokesman of the ZEUS experiment at the German particle physics laboratory DESY. Foster, who is also a violinist, graduated with a PhD in physics from Oxford University in 1978 and has held several positions in universities in the UK. His awards and titles include Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and winner of the Max Born Medal and Prize.

In their press release, the Royal Society stresses Foster's role as "international leader in the development of accelerators, instrumentation and physics analysis of electron-positron and electron-proton colliders." It goes on to say that his "vision of a strong UK contribution to this effort and to accelerator science is reflected in his founding the Adams Institute for Accelerator Science in Oxford and RHUL, of which he was the first director. His leading role in both the publication of the final classic analyses of electron-proton physics at HERA and in steering the development and physics potential of the ILC will continue for many years."

Fellows are elected for their contributions to science, both in fundamental research resulting in greater understanding, and also in leading and directing scientific and technological progress in industry and research establishments. A maximum of forty-four new Fellows, who must be citizens or residents of Commonwealth countries or Ireland, may be elected annually.

The ILC is a proposed particle accelerator that could help answer some of mankind's most fundamental questions. Consisting of two linear accelerators that face each other, the ILC will hurl some 10 billion electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, toward each other at nearly the speed of light. It will stretch approximately 31 kilometres in length. Inside the ILC, particles will collide 14,000 times every second at energies of 500 billion-electron-volts (GeV). The current baseline design allows for an upgrade to a 50-kilometre, 1 trillion-electron-volt (TeV) machine during the second stage of the project.

Additional information about the ILC: http://www.linearcollider.org