Tom McLeish

I am a very badly behaved academic. I know that physics is my 'core discipline' - it's a good one and I love it - but I trespass into interdisciplinary territory all the time.

Brief bio: first degree and PhD ('84) at Cambridge topped off with a short fellowship at Emmanuel College, then lectureship at Sheffield ('89-'92). I started working seriously across the chemistry-physics fence there through polymer science (and visiting the marvellous Biblical Studies group which sparked my love of ancient wisdom literature).

As Professor of Physics in Leeds ('93-'08) including 5 years as an EPSRC Fellow, I began to work with biologists as well. Some theological training as part of an anglican lay reader's course in the Diocese of Ripon made me think more about how science and religion both encompass and draw on all of human culture. So it planted the seeds of the book 'Faith and Wisdom in Science'. Leeds also has a wonderful History and Philosophy of Science group, and as a regular seminar attender I heard James Ginter on the 13th century thinker Robert Grosseteste. My suspicions that 'science' is really a very old strand of human culture, not exclusively modern at all, continued to be confirmed.

The offer of a position as pro-vice-chancellor for research at a university like Durham was irresistible to a madly interdisciplinary fanatic so Durham is where I worked, and paid to trespass, from 2008-2014. The medieval science stuff appears in the Faith and Wisdom in Science but there will be more - we are reworking and re-illuminting all of the 12 or so science treatises of Grosseteste as editions and commentaries (and making a 3D movie of his 'big bang' medieval cosmology!).

Since 2018 I have a new post at the University of York - the first new chair in 'Natural Philosophy' we think in 200 years! It signifies my role to build links and collaborations between the sciences and the humanities, and has been a wonderful place to finish the book 'The Poetry and Music of Science' that seeks to tell the common story of creativity that ties to roots of both art and science together.

Outside university life, music is a very important activity (our whole family is very invovled), mountains (hiking) and oceans (scuba diving) very important places.