The John Humphrey Plummer Professorships were established in 1931 from a bequest of £200,000 under the will of John Humphrey Plummer, an estate agent of Southport, to the University of Cambridge for the advancement of science. The fund has been used to endow a series of professorships in various scientific fields under a number of titles.
John Humphrey Plummer Professors
Colloidal Physics 1930–1931 Sir Eric Rideal
Colloid Science 1931–1946 Sir Eric Rideal 1947–1966 Francis Roughton
Mathematical Physics 1932–1944 Sir Ralph H. Fowler 1946–1958 Douglas Hartree
Theoretical Chemistry 1932–1953 Sir John Lennard-Jones (elected Principal of the University College of North Staffordshire, later Keele University, in 1953) 1954–1967 Christopher Longuet-Higgins
Physics 1960–1971 Sir Brian Pippard (elected Cavendish Professor of Physics in 1971) 1972–1984 Sir Sam Edwards
Biophysics 1970–1981 Sir Alan Hodgkin (awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963)
Applied Numerical Analysis 1976–2001 Michael J. D. Powell
Cell Biology 1983–2002 Sir John Gurdon (awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012)
Magnetic Resonance 1987–1999 Ray Freeman
Theoretical Physics 1993–2009 Michael Green (elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 2009)
Developmental Biology 2001–2008 Sir Jim Cuthbert Smith
Chemical and Structural Biology 2001–2017 Sir Chris Dobson (elected Master of St John's College in 2007)
Physics of Materials 2004–2014 Ullrich Steiner
Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Medicine 2018–present Mihaela van der Schaar
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