Robin Devenish is a retired

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

. An

Emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Fellow of Hertford College, Devenish is a former Dean of Hertford College, University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor of Physics. He is known for his work in the field of

deep inelastic scattering Deep inelastic scattering is the name given to a process used to probe the insides of hadrons (particularly the baryons, such as protons and neutrons), using electrons, muons and neutrinos. It provided the first convincing evidence of the reality ...

, and was awarded the

Max Born Prize The Max Born Medal and Prize is a scientific prize awarded yearly by the German Physical Society (DPG) and the British Institute of Physics (IOP) in memory of the German physicist Max Born, who was a German-Jewish physicist, instrumental in th ...

in December 2009 for his work in this field in which he is still active.

Education and early career

Devenish was educated by the Benedictines at St Benedict's School, Ealing and at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corpo ...

. He joined Oxford in 1979, having held various research positions in UK Universities and at the

DESY The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (English ''German Electron Synchrotron''), commonly referred to by the abbreviation DESY, is a national research center in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure of matt ...

Laboratory in Hamburg after finishing his doctorate in 1968. With Amanda Cooper-Sarkar, Devenish co-authored a book on the subject of deep inelastic scattering, entitled ''Deep Inelastic Scattering''.

Awards and honours

The Max Born prize (announced in December 2008) was awarded to Devenish in March 2009. The prize was awarded by the IoP because: "Devenish's work has led to important advances in our understanding of the structure of nucleons, in particular that of the proton. Devenish played a key role in the determination of the structure functions of the proton and the derivation of the quark and gluon densities at small Bjorken x, which has led to major advances in the understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics.".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Devenish, Robin Fellows of Hertford College, Oxford People educated at St Benedict's School, Ealing British physicists Living people Theoretical physicists Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Year of birth missing (living people)