Professor J Michael Kosterlitz elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

Brasenose offers congratulations to Professor J Michael Kosterlitz (Physics, 1966) on his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Professor Kosterlitz was a graduate of (BNC’s sister college) Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and came up to Brasenose for a Physics DPhil in 1966. He was appointed to the University of Birmingham as a lecturer and then a reader in 1974. In 1982 he became Professor of Physics at Brown University. He has been a visiting research fellow at Aalto University in Finland, and since 2016 has been a distinguished professor at the Korea institute for Advanced Study. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2016, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Brasenose in December 2016. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1993, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2026. He is currently Harrison E Farnsworth Professor of Physics at Brown University, Rhode Island.

His research is in condensed matter theory. He received the Maxwell Medal and Prize from the British Institute of Physics in 1981 and the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physics Society in 2000 for his work on the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition.

For more information on his election to the Royal Society Fellowship, please visit https://royalsociety.org/news/2026/05/new-fellows-announcement-2026/