1. Michele Dougherty has been elected to serve as President of the Institute of Physics from October 2025 and was appointed to Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council in September 2024.
22 Facts About Michele Dougherty
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Michele Dougherty became interested in outer space when she was ten years old, when her father built a 10-inch telescope through which she saw the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
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Michele Dougherty left South Africa for a fellowship in Germany, working on applied mathematics, before moving to Imperial College London in 1991.
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Michele Dougherty was appointed a Professor of Space Physics in 2004 and teaches undergraduates alongside her research.
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Michele Dougherty is Head of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London.
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Michele Dougherty is the Principal Investigator for two major space missions; the NASA Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn and the ESA JUICE spacecraft that will orbit Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede.
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Michele Dougherty is distinguished by the Royal Society "for her scientific leadership of the international NASA-ESA-ASI Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons".
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Michele Dougherty was Guest Investigator on the NASA Jupiter System Data Analysis Program as part of the Galileo uncrewed spacecraft.
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Michele Dougherty regularly delivers public lectures and appears on national media.
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Michele Dougherty was one of the guest scientists interviewed on Jim Al-Khalili's The Life Scientific.
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In 2007, Michele Dougherty won the Chree Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for "her contributions to the field of planetary magnetic fields and atmospheres and their interactions with the solar wind".
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Michele Dougherty won the 2008 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society "for innovative use of magnetic field data that led to discovery of an atmosphere around one of Saturn's moons and the way it revolutionised our view of the role of planetary moons in the Solar System".
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Michele Dougherty was the second woman ever to receive such an accolade, 102 years after Hertha Ayrton in 1906.
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Michele Dougherty was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012 and was recognized by the UK Science Council as one of the 100 top UK living scientists.
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Michele Dougherty was awarded a prestigious Royal Society Research Professorship in 2014.
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Michele Dougherty was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for geophysics in 2017, the fifth woman ever to receive the honour.
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Michele Dougherty has contributed significantly to the UK space sector, and chaired the Science Programme Advisory Committee of the UK Space Agency between 2014 and 2016.
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Michele Dougherty was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2018 New Year Honours for "services to UK Physical Science Research".
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Michele Dougherty won the 2018 Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics.
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In 2019 Michele Dougherty was named a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
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In 2019, Michele Dougherty was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
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And, thanks in no small part to Professor Michele Dougherty - it's made some astonishing discoveries.