Introduction
Sir David Charles Clary, FRS (born 14 January 1953) is a British theoretical chemist. He has been president of Magdalen College, Oxford, since 2005.
Life
He was born in Halesworth, Suffolk, and attended Colchester Royal Grammar School from 1964 to 1971. He has a BSc (1974) from the University of Sussex and a PhD (1977) and ScD (1997) from the University of Cambridge, where he was at Corpus Christi College. He undertook post-doctoral research at IBM in San Jose, California, and at the University of Manchester.
In 1980, he was appointed lecturer at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). In 1983, he was appointed lecturer and then reader in theoretical chemistry at the University of Cambridge, where he was fellow and senior tutor of Magdalene College. In 1996, he was director of the Centre for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry and professor at University College London. In 2002, he moved to the University of Oxford, where he was head of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and professorial fellow of St John's College.
Clary was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his development of the quantum theory for chemical reactions. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Institute of Physics; Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences anda member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He received an honorary DSc from the University of Sussex and was elected an honorary fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
He is editor of Chemical Physics Letters and was a reviewing editor of Science. He has held numerous visiting fellowships and given several named lectures.
From 2009 to 2013 he was the first chief scientific adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Clary was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to international science, and his current research focus is in developing semiclassical rate theories.