Congratulations to Miltos Tsiantis who is among the new Fellows elected to join the UK’s Royal Society for outstanding contributions in the field of sciences.

 

Miltos and his group at MPIPZ study plant organ development and diversity, with a focus on leaf development. He has shown how species-specific differences in developmental gene expression shape diverse leaf forms and how such genes influence the amount, duration, and direction of cellular growth to create distinct leaf geometries. For these projects he established the small garden weed, hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), as a model system for comparative studies in plant biology.

Miltos was born in the UK and studied biology in Athens before obtaining his DPhil from the University of Oxford. He conducted postdoctoral research at Oxford, holding a number of research fellowships including a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and spent some of that time on research visits to Berkeley. He became a University Lecturer (2003) and Professor of Plant Developmental Genetics in Oxford (2010), and was a Tutorial Fellow at Wadham College. Since 2013, he is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. His honours include EMBO membership, EMBO Young Investigator, the Balfour Lecture of the Genetics Society, a Royal Society Wolfson merit award and the Society of Experimental Biology’s President’s Medal.

Miltos said “it is a huge and humbling honour to be elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society. I would like to thank all members of our research group and coworkers with whom we worked together to carry out the research recognized by this distinction”

Founded in 1660, the Royal Society accommodates around 1700 Fellows and Foreign Members. Every Year the UK’s National Science Academy, announces its new intake of Fellows, based on excellence in science. Fellows are elected for life through a peer review process. Selection of fellows are made by candidates having made 'a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science’.

The Royal Society is dedicated to ‘promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use for science for the benefit of humanity’.