Peter Littlewood

Peter Brent Littlewood, FRS (18 May 1955 – 15 June 2026) was a British physicist and academic who was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He was the 12th Director of Argonne National Laboratory. He previously headed the Cavendish Laboratory as well as the Theory of Condensed Matter group and the Theoretical Physics Research department at Bell Laboratories. Littlewood served as the founding chair of the board of trustees of the Faraday Institution from 2018 to 2024.

Life and career

Littlewood was born on 18 May 1955. He gained a first-class degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1976, and was then awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years. Littlewood returned to Cambridge in 1977 to complete his PhD.

Beginning in 1980, he worked at Bell Labs, finishing his time there as head of the theoretical physics research after assuming the position in 1992. He continued to be a member of technical staff until 2001.

In 1997, he became a professor at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and was head of the Theory of Condensed Matter group, and served as Matthias Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory during a 2003-04 sabbatical. In 2005, he returned to Cambridge to become head of the Cavendish Laboratory, before being named in 2011 the Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences and Engineering at the Argonne National Laboratory.