We are delighted to announce that Professor Ann McNeill and Professor Kei (Kwangwook) Cho have received awards in the King's New Years Honours 2026.
Professor Ann McNeill received a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Services to Addiction and Mental Health; and Professor Kei Cho has been awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to UK-Korea Relations in the areas of Science and Health.
Ann McNeill is a Professor of Tobacco Addiction in the National Addiction Centre at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), and has worked on tobacco and nicotine research for over 40 years.
She joined the (then) Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) in 1985 where she studied the development of dependence on smoking as a PhD. Her research expanded to include smoking cessation and the application of a range of tobacco control policies and interventions, including harm reduction strategies, to reduce both individual and population level impacts of smoking.
Professor McNeill established the Nicotine Research Group which rapidly became internationally recognised for its research. Until end-December 2025 she was Co-Director of the National Institute for Health & Care Research (NIHR) Policy Research Unit in Addictions. In 2019, she became the inaugural Vice Dean (Culture, Diversity and Inclusion) at the IoPPN.
She has a particular interest in reducing the health inequalities caused by smoking, notably among people with mental health conditions. She has published more than 450 peer-reviewed publications, and her research has informed national- and local-level policies to reduce smoking.
It is a huge privilege to receive this award for which I am very grateful. I would however like to thank the many inspirational and hard-working people I have worked alongside during my career, from all walks of life, professions, ages and backgrounds, including people with lived experience, without whom, this award would not have been bestowed. Cigarettes are uniquely dangerous products and the work will continue to make smoking obsolete.
Professor Ann McNeill, Professor of Tobacco Addiction at King's College London
Kei Cho is Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience at the IoPPN and leads the Synapse and Therapeutic Discovery Laboratory.
Over the last 20 years, Professor Cho has identified several potential mechanistic targets for curtailing synapse weakening. He is interested in the consequence of physiological and pathophysiological synapse weakening in excitatory neurons in the brain with respect to the functional and structural modification of the synapse.
Professor Cho identified the role of the microtubule associated protein tau in synapse weakening mechanism and continues to determine how aberrant synapse weakening is expressed and what the physiological and pathological consequences might be and identify therapeutic target for neurodegenerative disease, specifically dementia.
He has been at King's since 2018 until the end of 2025 as part of the UK Dementia Research Institute, with which he still collaborates.
In 2005 Professor Cho initiated UK-Korea Neuroscience collaboration activity and over 20 years played key roles in promoting and organising UK-Korea Neuroscience collaboration bringing biology and technology experts to discuss major issues in health and diseases and to identify emerging areas that may benefit from strategic partnerships between the two countries. This has currently expanded to UK-Japan-Korea Trilateral Open-Innovation platform for Life Science-AI.
I am so thrilled and honoured to receive this recognition. Also, I sincerely appreciate my colleagues and various government bodies from the UK and South Korea who have supported and helped me for many years, specifically King's, the Medical Research Council and the British Embassy in Seoul. It was my great pleasure to work with the Neuroscience community and aim to provide a solution to improve quality of life through UK-Korea Neuroscience collaboration. Finally, my thanks go to the Korean Embassy London from the bottom of my heart for their endless support.
Professor Kei Cho, Professor of Neuroscience at King's College London
Ann and Kei are outstanding scholars and I am delighted that their contributions have been recognised in this way. Their achievements exemplify how endeavours can have true impact and change lives internationally through research, education and collaboration.
Professor Matthew Hotopf, Executive Dean at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
