Robert May, Baron May of Oxford
Australian scientist who has been Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government (1936-2020)
Robert McCredie May, Baron May of Oxford (8 January 1936 – 28 April 2020) was an Australian scientist who was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, President of the Royal Society, and a professor at the University of Sydney and Princeton University. He held joint professorships at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He was also a crossbench member of the House of Lords from 2001 until his retirement in 2017.
May was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and an appointed member of the council of the British Science Association. He was also a member of the advisory council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering.
Early life and education
May was born in Sydney on 8 January 1936, to lawyer Henry Wilkinson May and Kathleen Mitchell (née McCredie), who divorced when he was seven years old. His father was of prosperous middle-class Northern Irish origin, and his mother was the daughter of a Scottish engineer. May was educated at Sydney Boys High School. He then attended the University of Sydney, where he studied chemical engineering and theoretical physics (BSc 1956) and received a PhD in theoretical physics in 1959. He was a patron of the Sydney High School Old Boys Union.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Robert May, Baron May of Oxford” is australian scientist who has been Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government (1936-2020). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Robert, Baron and Oxford, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q336397. VIAF identifies the subject as 25799512. The Library of Congress control number is n80087648. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 2020, 2001 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert May, Baron May of Oxford” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.