Gratitude to the University of Cambridge faculty.

Thank you for teaching a generation of physicists in the open, giving away world-class lecture notes so anyone anywhere can learn the deepest ideas in physics for free.

Thank you for revealing the hidden physics of living things, from swimming algae to the geometry of life, with a curiosity that makes science feel like wonder.

Thank you for a Fields Medal mind that champions doing mathematics in the open, from the Polymath collaborations to explaining hard ideas so patiently that more people can join in.

Thank you for co-founding string theory and carrying the Lucasian chair once held by Newton and Hawking, patiently pursuing a quantum theory of gravity across a lifetime.

Thank you for a lifetime shaping modern combinatorics and for mentoring so many brilliant mathematicians, including a future Fields medalist, with generosity and rigor.

Thank you for turning carbon-based plastics into light, giving the world the OLED screens now in billions of pockets, and for building companies that carried the science out of the lab.

Thank you for finding the first planet around another sun-like star and reopening humanity's oldest question, are we alone, with the patience and daring of a true explorer.

Thank you for hunting exotic states of matter under extreme pressure and magnetic fields, and for bringing physics and the arts together so science feels human and alive.

Thank you for co-inventing Solexa/Illumina sequencing, the chemistry that made reading a human genome fast and affordable and changed medicine and biology forever.

Thank you for co-inventing next-generation sequencing and for pioneering single-molecule tools that now help us see how proteins misfold in diseases like Alzheimer's.

Thank you for looking inside working batteries with NMR to understand why they age, science that is helping build the cleaner energy storage the world urgently needs.

Thank you for the Josephson effect, discovered as a Cambridge graduate student, a piece of quantum physics now built into the world's most sensitive instruments and quantum computers.

Thank you for a lifetime advancing how we build complex molecules and pioneering flow chemistry, and for training so many synthetic chemists across your 900-plus papers.

Thank you for helping the internet carry multimedia to everyone and for founding opportunistic networking, working to bring connectivity even to the hardest-to-reach places.

Thank you for building rigorous computational models of human language and for leading your department, laying groundwork that underpins how machines understand words today.

Thank you for creating the Isabelle theorem prover and for showing that machines can help humans prove mathematics and verify systems with genuine, checkable certainty.

Thank you for championing probabilistic machine learning, honest about uncertainty, and for building a Cambridge group whose ideas quietly shape much of modern AI.

Thank you for teaching machines to see, turning ordinary images into accurate 3D understanding and carrying that vision research all the way into real products.

Thank you for making Gaussian processes practical and for writing the freely available textbook that taught so many of us principled, uncertainty-aware machine learning.

Thank you for showing that severe obesity and diabetes can have real genetic causes, replacing blame with biology and giving patients answers and better treatments.

Thank you for decades unravelling rare hormone disorders, work that has given patients with once-baffling thyroid and metabolic conditions a name, a cause, and hope.

Thank you for revealing the atomic structure of the ribosome, the machine that reads our genes into life, and for writing so openly and humanely about how science is really done.

Thank you for believing in cryo-EM for decades until it worked, giving biology a way to see proteins in near-atomic detail and transforming how we understand life and design medicines.

Thank you for humanizing antibodies and pioneering phage display, the science behind blockbuster medicines that have eased suffering for millions of patients worldwide.

A distinguished social psychologist who crossed the Atlantic to lead one of the world's great universities, steering Cambridge with steady judgment and care for its people.

Elected the 109th Chancellor in 2025, he brings a lifetime of public service and a deep love of learning to Cambridge's most historic office.

He carries both a scholar's insight into political economy and a leader's care for education and the planet, shaping how Cambridge teaches and lives sustainably.

He has spent years building bridges across the university community, pairing scholarship in strategy with a genuine devotion to belonging and engagement.

After more than twenty years teaching generations of Cambridge students, he became the first internal Dean in three decades, guiding the school toward responsible business.

His work on frugal innovation shows how great ideas can serve billions with less, a hopeful vision of enterprise that lifts developed and emerging economies alike.

She has spent a career asking what our economic statistics truly measure, insisting that progress should count what really matters to people's lives.

The Dasgupta Review reframed nature as an asset we must not squander, a landmark of moral clarity that placed biodiversity at the heart of economics.

With The Sleepwalkers and Iron Kingdom he taught a generation how Europe stumbled into catastrophe and rebuilt itself, writing history that reads like the best of literature.

His Third Reich trilogy stands as a monument of scholarship and moral seriousness, and he defended the very idea of honest, evidence-based history in a famous courtroom.

Her scholarship on empire and resistance, and her book Insurgent Empire, recover voices too long left out, told with courage and rigor.

One of Britain's finest essayists, he has thought harder than almost anyone about what universities are for, and defended learning as a public good.

The first woman to hold Cambridge's oldest philosophy chair, she brings speech, justice, and human dignity together in work of rare depth and humanity.

A philosopher who made hard ideas genuinely clear and even joyful, he brought ethics and quasi-realism to a wide public without ever cheapening the thought.

His study of atheism in the ancient world and the Greek novel opens fresh windows on antiquity, worn lightly and shared generously.

For nearly forty years at Newnham she made the ancient world feel alive and urgent, insisting that classics is about the future as much as the past.

A leading voice on EU and labour law, she has explained Britain and Europe to the public with clarity and fairness through years of momentous change.

His scholarship helped shape modern human rights and public law in Britain, a steady defender of civil liberties across decades of teaching.

Her work on energy, money, and democracy makes sense of a disordered century, and she shares it with a wide audience with unusual clarity.

A historian of Europe's great questions who founded the Centre for Geopolitics, he brings deep historical perspective to the challenges facing our world today.

A leading philosophical theologian, she thinks across metaphysics, liturgy, and poetics with a depth that has helped shape contemporary theology.

A public theologian who founded the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme, he has devoted his life to understanding across traditions and to peace and reconciliation.