A FORMER Atherton schoolboy has become the youngest person to be awarded the position of professor in his field.

Thirty-six year-old Professor Jeffrey Robert Forshaw, who attended Hesketh Fletcher High School, is now a professor in theoretical particle physics at the University of Manchester.

After achieving a first class honours degree at Oriel College at Oxford, Prof Forshaw gained a doctorate at Manchester.

He went to work at the Rutherford Laboratory in Oxford, and returned to Manchester in 1995 as a lecturer.

Prof Forshaw was awarded the Maxwell Medal from the Institute of Physics in 1999, for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics in the previous 10 years.

He is a scientific associate of the world's largest partical physics laboratory in Switzerland, and has had over 80 papers published.