Glittering prizes

Sir Roger Penrose, 67, emeritus Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and Bernard Crick, 68, chairman of the government's commission on citizenship in schools and author of George Orwell: A Life, have received honorary fellowships from Birkbeck College, London.

Lord Rothschild, 62, chairman of the Rothschild Investment Trust and Lord Justice Phillips, 60, now chairing the BSE inquiry, have been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Exeter.

Dame Barbara Clayton, honorary professor in metabolism at Southampton University, where she was previously dean of the faculty of medicine, has won the Gold Medal of the British Medical Association.

Paul Little, Medical Research Council clinical scientist in primary medical care at Southampton, has been awarded a John Fry Award by the Royal College of General Practitioners.

Ruth Chadwick, head of the centre for professional ethics at the University of Central Lancashire, has been awarded a visiting professorship at Tsukuba University, Japan.

Norman Fenton, professor of computing in the centre for software reliability at City University, has been named one of the world's top 15 systems and software scholars for the period 1993 to 1997 by the American Computing Journal of Systems and Software.