Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of London judges to have made a 'substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science'.^[1]

Fellowship of the Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, is a significant honour which has been awarded to many eminent scientists from history including Isaac Newton (1672),^[2] Charles Darwin (1839),^[2] Michael Faraday (1824),^[2] Ernest Rutherford (1903),^[4] Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918),^[5] Albert Einstein (1921),^[6] Winston Churchill (1941), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944),^[7] Dorothy Hodgkin (1947),^[8] Alan Turing (1951)^[9] and Francis Crick (1959).^[10][11] More recently, fellowship has been awarded to Stephen Hawking (1974), Tim Hunt (1991), Elizabeth Blackburn (1992), Tim Berners-Lee (2001), Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (2003), Atta-ur Rahman (2006),^[12] Andre Geim (2007),^[13] James Dyson (2015), Ajay Kumar Sood (2015), Subhash Khot (2017), Elon Musk (2018),^[14] and around 8,000 others in total,^[2] including over 280 Nobel Laureates since 1900. As of October 2018, there are approximately 1689 living Fellows, Foreign and Honorary Members, of which over 60 are Nobel Laureates.^[3][15]

Fellowship of the Royal Society has been described by The Guardian newspaper as “the equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar”^[16] with several institutions celebrating their announcement each year.^{[17][18][19][20][21][22][23]}

Up to 60 new Fellows (FRS), honorary (HonFRS) and foreign members (ForMemRS) are elected annually in late April or early May, from a pool of around 700 proposed candidates each year.^[24] New Fellows can only be nominated by existing Fellows for one of the fellowships described below:

Every year, up to 52 new Fellows are elected from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations which make up around 90% of the society.^[1] Each candidate is considered on their merits and can be proposed from any sector of the scientific community. Fellows are elected for life on the basis of excellence in science and are entitled to use the post-nominal letters FRS.^[1] See Category:Fellows of the Royal Society and Category:Female Fellows of the Royal Society.

Every year, Fellows elect up to ten new Foreign Members.

Like Fellows, Foreign Members are elected for life through peer review on the basis of excellence in science. As of 2016 there are around 165 Foreign Members, who are entitled to use the post-nominal ForMemRS.^[26] See Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society.

Honorary Fellowship is an honorary academic title awarded to candidates who have given distinguished service to the cause of science, but do not have the kind of scientific achievements required of Fellows or Foreign Members. Honorary Fellows include Bill Bryson (2013), Melvyn Bragg (2010), Robin Saxby (2015), David Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury of Turville (2008) and Onora O'Neill (2007). Honorary Fellows are entitled to use the post nominal letters FRS.^[3] Others including John Maddox (2000),^[28] Patrick Moore (2001) and Lisa Jardine (2015)^[10][30] were elected as honorary fellows, see Category:Honorary Fellows of the Royal Society.

Statute 12 is a legacy mechanism for electing members before official honorary membership existed in 1997.

Fellows elected under statute 12 include David Attenborough (1983) and John Palmer, 4th Earl of Selborne (1991). Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom such as Margaret Thatcher (1983),^[2] Neville Chamberlain (1938),^[2] Ramsay Macdonald (1930) and H. H. Asquith (1908)^[2] were elected under statute 12, see Category:Fellows of the Royal Society (Statute 12).

The Council of the Royal Society can recommend members of the British Royal Family for election as Royal Fellows of the Royal Society. As of 2016 there are five royal fellows:

Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth II is not a Royal Fellow, but provides her patronage to the Society as all reigning British monarchs have done since Charles II of England. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1951) was elected under statute 12, not as a Royal Fellow.^[36]

The election of new fellows is announced annually in May, after their nomination and a period of peer-reviewed selection.^[1]

Each candidate for Fellowship or Foreign Membership is nominated by two Fellows of the Royal Society (a proposer and a seconder), who sign a certificate of proposal.^[37] Previously, nominations required at least five fellows to support each nomination by the proposer,^[37] which was criticised for supposedly establishing an old-boy network and elitist gentlemen's club.^[38][39][40] The certificate of election (see for example^[41]) includes a statement of the principal grounds on which the proposal is being made. There is no limit on the number of nominations made each year. In 2015, there were 654 candidates for election as Fellows and 106 candidates for Foreign Membership.^[1]

The Council of the Royal Society oversees the selection process and appoints 10 subject area committees, known as Sectional Committees,^[15] to recommend the strongest candidates for election to Fellowship.

The final list of up to 52 Fellowship candidates and up to 10 Foreign Membership candidates is confirmed by the Council in April and a secret ballot of Fellows is held at a meeting in May. A candidate is elected if he or she secures two-thirds of votes of those Fellows present and voting.

A maximum of 18 Fellowships can be allocated to candidates from Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences; and up to 10 from Applied Sciences, Human Sciences and Joint Physical and Biological Sciences.

A further maximum of 6 can be ‘Honorary’, ‘General’ or ‘Royal’ Fellows.

Nominations for Fellowship are peer reviewed by sectional committees, each with 15 members and a chair. Members of the 10 sectional committees change every 3 years to mitigate in-group bias,^[37] each group covers different specialist areas including:

New Fellows are admitted to the Society at a formal admissions day ceremony held annually in July,^[43] when they sign the Charter Book and the Obligation which reads: "We who have hereunto subscribed, do hereby promise, that we will endeavour to promote the good of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and to pursue the ends for which the same was founded; that we will carry out, as far as we are able, those actions requested of us in the name of the Council; and that we will observe the Statutes and Standing Orders of the said Society.

Provided that, whensoever any of us shall signify to the President under our hands, that we desire to withdraw from the Society, we shall be free from this Obligation for the future".^[1]

Since 2014, portraits of Fellows at the admissions ceremony have been published without copyright restrictions in Wikimedia Commons under a more permissive Creative Commons license which allows wider re-use.^[44][45]

In addition to the main Fellowships of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS & HonFRS), other fellowships are available which are applied for by individuals, rather than through election.

Holders of these fellowships are known as Royal Society Research Fellows.^[47]

In addition to the award of Fellowship (FRS, HonFRS & ForMemRS) and the Research Fellowships described above, several other awards, lectures and medals of the Royal Society are also given.