Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy
The Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Philosophy is one of the senior chairs in Natural and Experimental philosophy at Cambridge University, and was founded in 1782 by a bequest from the Reverend Richard Jackson.
Didier Queloz, incumbent Jacksonian Professor since 2021
Didier Patrick Queloz is a Swiss astronomer. He is the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a professor at the University of Geneva. Together with Michel Mayor in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. For this discovery, he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics with Mayor and Jim Peebles. In 2021, he was announced as the founding director of the Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life at ETH Zurich.
Queloz in 2017
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (2019) during Nobel week ceremony award