Professor Céline Boehm from the Faculty of Science, Professor Paul Martin from the Faculty of Medicine and Health and Save Sight Institute, and Professor David Raubenheimer from the Charles Perkins Centre and the Faculty of Science have been named Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science, honoured for their outstanding contributions to science. 

They are among 28 new members admitted to the Academy in 2026, with expertise spanning fundamental discovery, translational research and the commercial application of Australian science.

President of the Academy Professor Chennupati Jagadish AC said this year's cohort demonstrated both the depth of Australian science and the path from discovery to impact.

“This cohort includes scientists whose work is rewriting the textbooks and has changed the world,” Professor Jagadish said.

Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science are among the nation’s most distinguished scientists, elected by their peers for groundbreaking research and contributions that have had clear impact.

“Their work shows what Australia is capable of when its scientists are supported from fundamental discovery through to global application.”

Professor Céline Boehm, an astroparticle physicist from the Faculty of Science has made landmark contributions to dark matter research, leading to a paradigm shift by demonstrating that dark matter particles could be much lighter than previously considered.

Her pioneering work on light dark matter has catalysed pivotal experiments searching for dark matter particles, driving innovative searches at the Large Hadron Collider and low-energy particle physics experiments.

Professor Boehm’s influence is illustrated by her highly cited publications, including her famous paper on scalar dark matter. Her research on dark matter interactions in cosmology has sparked new avenues, using large-scale structure surveys to constrain microscopic interactions. 

Professor Boehm has also demonstrated exceptional leadership by running a European Space Agency Consortium.

Professor Paul Martin from the Faculty of Medicine and Health and Save Sight Institute has transformed our understanding of evolution and function of the visual system.

His work shows how evolutionarily ancient visual pathways, that were considered vestigial in the brains of humans and monkeys, contribute to diverse and important visual functions such as colour vision and movement perception.

These pathways begin in the eye and project centrally via the lateral geniculate nucleus, a structure that Professor Martin's work revealed to be a much more than a humble relay nucleus. 

Professor David Raubenheimer from the Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Science is a world leader in nutritional ecology. He has combined theory from ecological, evolutionary, physiological and behavioural sciences with nutrition to produce the conceptual foundations for the field.

He co-invented nutritional geometry, a modelling framework, for implementing this synthesis and applied it to produce important new insights that have had transformational impacts on several fields, among them gerontology, primatology, ecology and human nutrition.

His specific discoveries include new understanding of the relationship between diet and ageing and of the causes of human obesity, a new approach for designing animal feeds, and important contributions to primatology and ecology.

The full list of the 2026 Australian Academy of Science Fellows can be viewed here.