Sir David Clary was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford from 2002-2022. He is now an Emeritus Professor. From 2005-20 he was President of Magdalen College Oxford, where he is now an Honorary Fellow. Before coming to Magdalen he was Head of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of St John’s College. He has held faculty positions at Manchester, Cambridge and UCL. He was a Fellow and Senior Tutor at Magdalene College Cambridge, where he was also elected an Honorary Fellow. His PhD was at Cambridge where he additionally holds the Sc.D. He was an undergraduate at the University of Sussex where he was more recently awarded the Doctor of Science, honoris causa.
Sir David was the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the Foreign Office from 2009-13 and before that was President of the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has been elected to several academies including the Royal Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He has won many prizes for his research including the Royal Society of Chemistry Meldola, Marlow, Corday-Morgan, Tilden, Polanyi, Chemical Dynamics, Liversidge and Spiers awards, and the medal of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He has given many named lectures including the Kistiakowsky Lecture at Harvard and the Pitzer Lecture at Berkeley. He was knighted in the 2016 Queen’s birthday honours for services to international science.
His book Schrödinger in Oxford was published by World Scientific in 2022.
