Sir John Enderby

Sir John Enderby is a past Physical Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society. He is a Senior Research Fellow and H.O. Wills Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at the University of Bristol and Chief Scientist at the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and became its Physical Secretary and Vice President in 1999. He is a past President of the Institute of Physics. He was educated at Westminster College and Birkbeck College in London where he gained his BSc and Ph.D. He was founder member of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, and served on its Audit Committee and Chaired the Education and Training Committee. Between 1985 and 1998, he served as the British Director of the Institut Laue Langevin located at Grenoble, France.

Professor Enderby's primary research interest has been in the structure and properties of liquid metals and semiconductors, ionic fluids, glasses and amorphous solids and he has published over 180 papers in this field. His current research work is on levitation studies on high temperature liquids and non-invasive methods of measuring glucose levels in humans. He is Chairman of Melys Diagnostics Ltd, a company whose focus is the application of optical techniques to medical physics.

He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1971, the Academia Europaea in 1989 and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997. Amongst the awards and distinctions he has received are the Westminster College Wright Prize (1953), the Birkbeck College Award (1956) the Guthrie Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (1995) and Honorary Awards from Chicago (Argonne Fellow), Loughborough  (DSc), Leicester (DSc), Sheffield (DSc), East Anglia(DSc), Bristol (DSc),Kent (DSc) and Birkbeck College (Honorary Fellowship). His most recent appointments include Chairmanship of the 2001 Research Physics Panel for UK Universities. He was knighted for services to Science and Technology in 2004.