Steven Cowley

Steven Charles Cowley FRS FREng is a theoretical physicist and international authority on nuclear fusion and astrophysical plasmas. He has served as President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford since October 2016 having previously been head of the EURATOM / CCFE Fusion Association and Chief Executive Officer of UKAEA.

Cowley was educated at the University of Oxford where he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in 1981. He went on to study at Princeton University as a Harkness Fellow and was awarded a PhD in 1985 for research into tokamaks supervised by Russell Kulsrud.

Following his PhD, Cowley completed postdoctoral research at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). He returned to Princeton in 1987 and joined the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1993, becoming Full Professor in 2000. At Imperial, Cowley led the plasma physics group from 2001 to 2003 where he is now a part-time Professor. He was appointed as the Head of the EURATOM / CCFE Fusion Association in September 2008 and as CEO of UKAEA in November 2009. As of 2015, Cowley was paid a salary of between £205,000 and £209,999 by the UKAEA, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the British public sector at that time. On the 18th of March 2015 he was elected the 31st President of Corpus Christi College Oxford, his alma mater, and he took up the post on the 1st of October 2016. He is the first scientist to ever hold the post.

Cowley's research interests are in plasmas and nuclear fusion, in astrophysical plasmas and the laboratory, such as the Joint European Torus (JET) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). His research has been funded by Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Cowley co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences assessment of plasma science in the United States.

Cowley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His biography reads;

His certificate of election reads:

Cowley is also an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) the Institute of Physics (FInstP), the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng). In 2011, he was appointed to the UK Government's Council for Science and Technology.