2021 Mendel Medal – Professor Dame Linda Partridge

Professor Dame Linda Partridge, a past president of the Genetics Society, is awarded the Mendel Medal by current president Professor Laurence Hurst.

Linda Partridge is the Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and a Professorial Fellow at UCL.  Linda trained as an evolutionary biologist, and her early work focussed on the evolutionary genetics of life histories, including ageing.  She subsequently helped to establish the evolutionary conservation of mechanisms of ageing, and her current work explores the possibility of repurposing existing drugs to maintain human health in old age. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

On hearing that she has been awarded the Mendel Medal, Linda said: “I am most honoured and delighted to be awarded the Mendel Medal. As an ex-President of the Genetics Society this award is of particular significance to me.”

We hope that Linda will be able to be presented with the award in person in October 2021.