An expert at the University of Oxford has resigned from the UK’s national academy of sciences over concerns about Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship.

Professor Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology and a leading expert on children’s communication disorders, said she handed back her fellowship of the Royal Society last week.

Controversy surrounding Mr Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and owner of X, formerly Twitter, has grown after he backed Donald Trump in the US election.

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Prof Bishop told the Guardian her move was a "gut reaction", adding she had met the president and the chief executive after indicating her decision to resign, who stressed the need to follow due process over Mr Musk.

(Image: Oxford University) She said: "I just started to think, you know, the Royal Society seemed to be set up to make it very, very difficult to ever get somebody to resign or to actually get thrown out, and given all I know about Musk, it felt grubby, to be honest."

Prof Bishop added: "It just felt having him in the Royal Society seemed such a contradiction of all the values of the Royal Society. And I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it.”

The professor also pointed to the Royal Society’s code of conduct, which stresses the need for fellows to treat each other with courtesy.

Writing in a blogpost, Prof Bishop said she did not expect her resignation to have an impact, but it made her feel more comfortable.

She wrote: “Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS (Fellowship of Royal Society) is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain."

(Image: Oxford Mail) In April, Oxford University shut down an academic institute which previously received funding from Elon Musk.

The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was shut down by the faculty of philosophy on April 16 after 19 years of operation.

The institute was founded in 2005 and was run by Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom.

The institute said the closure came after having "faced increasing administrative headwinds within the faculty of philosophy .”

In the institute’s final report published on April 12, Anders Sandberg, a former senior research fellow at the FHI, claimed the finals years were “affected by a gradual suffocation by faculty bureaucracy.”

The faculty of philosophy imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring in 2020, and decided not to renew the contracts of staff in late 2023, according to the report.

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Andy is the Trade and Tourism reporter for the Oxford Mail and you can sign up to his newsletters for free here. 

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