Institute of Physics Awards

The IOP awards recognise and reward excellence in people and teams who have made outstanding and exceptional contributions to the strength of physics.

The deadline for submitting nominations for the 2017 awards is now closed. Nominations for our 2018 Awards will open in October.

Our awards reflect the breadth of work in the physics community across academia, industry, education and outreach.

For 2017 we introduced a revised portfolio of awards. All of our established medals remain unchanged, and we have made changes to enable us to recognise and reward remarkable contributions to physics.

• New medals recognise excellence in soft matter physics, outreach, education and very early-career physics. They’re named in honour of Sam Edwards, Marie Curie-Sklodowska, Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Mary Somerville and Daphne Jackson. The Swan Medal (previously the Business and Innovation Medal), which recognises outstanding and sustained contributions to the organisation or application of physics in an industrial or commercial context, has been renamed in honour of Katharine Burr Blodgett
• We’ve standardised the terminology and medal categories: Gold, for outstanding and sustained contributions, Subject Medals for distinguished contributions in a particular area of physics, and Early Career Medals for exceptional early-career contributions.
• We’ve altered the way in which nominations for the Subject Medals will be sought. Previously each of these subject based medals has been awarded in alternate years. We are now seeking nominations for all subject-based medals each year. We’ve grouped these medals in pairs under a broader subject heading, nominations will be sought for each Subject Medal every year and the strongest nomination in each category will be awarded the relevant medal. The strongest nomination will be awarded the relevant medal in that category – the terms of which remain unchanged from previous years

We hope that these changes will enable the awards programme to be more responsive to the evolving physics landscape, and that they’ll enable us to more effectively recognise and reward remarkable contributions to physics at each career stage in all relevant fields. You can find details of the changes on the Gold, Subject and Early Career Medal pages below.

View our International Medal	View our Gold Medals
View our Subject Medals	View our Early Career Medals

Should you have any questions about our awards programme, please email awards@iop.org or call +44 (0)20 7470 4800.