Professor J Roy Sambles

Professor of Experimental Physics

Professor John Roy Sambles F R S, F Inst P, was born in Cornwall, United Kingdom in 1945. He studied Physic at Imperial College London, obtaining a first class honours degree in 1967 and a PhD in solid state physics in 1970. Following a 2 year PDRA in surface physics at Imperial in 1972 he was appointed lecturer in Physics at the University of Exeter, and was awarded the first ever internal promotion to a chair in Physics at Exeter in 1991. In 2002 he was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society for his contribution to a broad range of research on the fundamentals of melting, spin waves in metals, molecular rectification, liquid crystal optics and plasmonics. In 1998 he was awarded the George Gray medal of the British Liquid Crystal Society, in 2003 he received the Thomas Young medal of the Institute of Physics and in 2012 he was awarded the Faraday medal by the Institute of Physics. He is a Council member of EPSRC, being also Chair of its Resource Audit Committee, in addition he provides scientific advice to the Government.