Honorary Fellows: Professor Peter Raynes FInstP, FRS
Department of Chemistry, University of York.
For his major contributions to physics through his influential research on liquid crystal materials and displays.
Following degrees in physics at the University of Cambridge, Peter Raynes dedicated more than 40 years to scientific research into liquid crystals materials and devices after joining the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern in 1971, where he remained for 21 years.
Raynes has played a crucial role in the development of liquid crystal displays (LCDs): a technology that is now used by the vast majority of televisions and computers. Raynes’s inventions and techniques played a vital role in putting LCDs in the prime position that they are in today: they have been licensed to the world’s major manufacturers and have resulted in royalties to the UK of over £100 m.
Raynes was director of research of Sharp Laboratories (Europe) Ltd until 1998 when he took up the chair of optoelectronic engineering in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He is currently an emeritus professor at Oxford and an honorary visiting professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York. He received an honorary doctorate in 2012 from the University of Hull.
Prof. Raynes is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics and the Society for Information Display. He has been awarded the Rank Prize for Optoelectronics, the Paterson Medal of the IOP, the Jan Rajchman Prize of the Society for Information Display and the G W Gray Medal of the British Liquid Crystal Society.