List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Edinburgh
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Max Born, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, was Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy from 1936 to 1953 at the University of Edinburgh. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954.
As of October 2020, 19 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University of Edinburgh as alumni, faculty members or researchers. Among the laureates, six are Edinburgh alumni (graduates and attendees), and five have been long-term academic members of the Edinburgh faculty. Three additional laureates had acted as administrative staff of the university.[4] The University of Edinburgh has the most Nobel affiliations among universities in Scotland.
The university affiliations in this list are all official academic affiliations such as degree programs and official academic employment, including academic positions at research organizations formally affiliated with or operated by the University of Edinburgh. Non-academic affiliations such as advisory committees and administrative staff are generally excluded. The official academic affiliations fall into three categories: 1) Alumni (graduates and attendees), 2) Long-term academic staff, and 3) Short-term academic staff. Graduates are defined as those who hold Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorate or equivalent degrees from Edinburgh, while attendees are those who formally enrolled in degree programs at Edinburgh but did not complete the programs; thus, honorary degrees, posthumous degrees, summer attendees, exchange students and auditing students are excluded. The category of "Long-term academic staff" consists of tenure or tenure-track and equivalent academic positions, while that of "Short-term academic staff" consists of lecturers (without tenure), postdoctoral researchers (postdocs), visiting professors or scholars (visitors), and equivalent academic positions. The specific academic title solely determines the type of affiliation, regardless of the actual time the position was held by a laureate.
Further explanations on "visitors" under "Short-term academic staff" are now presented. 1) All informal or personal visits are excluded from the list; 2) all employment-based visiting positions, which carry teaching or research duties, are included as affiliations in the list; 3) for award-based visiting positions, this list includes the positions as affiliations only if the laureates were required to assume employment-level duty (teaching or research) or the laureates specifically classified the visiting positions as "appointment" or similar in reliable sources such as their curriculum vitae. To be specific, some award/honour-based visiting positions such as the "Gifford Lectureship" at the University of Edinburgh are awards/honours without employment-level duty. In particular, attending meetings and giving public lectures, talks or non-curricular seminars at Edinburgh is not a form of employment-level duty; attending meetings and giving public lectures, talks or non-curricular seminars are not employment-level duties. Finally, summer visitors are generally excluded from the list unless summer work yielded significant end products such as research publications and components of Nobel-winning work since summer terms are not part of formal academic years.
Some visitors and staff not qualified as official academic affiliates
Gifford Lectures entitled Causality and Complementarity: Epistemological Lessons of Studies in Atomic Physics in 1949[12][13]
Summary
In the following table, the number following a person's name is the year they received the prize. In particular, a number with an asterisk (*) means the person received the award while they were working at the University of Edinburgh (including emeritus staff). A name underlined implies that this person has been listed previously (i.e., multiple affiliations).
Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 senior student 1954–1955, senior research fellow 1955–1956, lecturer in Mathematical Physics 1960–1970, reader 1970–1980, professor 1980–1996, and emeritus professor 1996–present[19]
"for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle"[20]
"for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules [...] for their development of soft desorptionionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules"[28]
The Nobel Prize are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to Mankind." Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist most famously known for the invention of dynamite. He died in 1896. In his will, he bequeathed all of his "remaining realisable assets" to be used to establish five prizes which became known as "Nobel Prizes." Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is an economics award administered by the Nobel Foundation. Although not one of the Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, the winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar way, are announced along with the Nobel Prize recipients, and the prize is presented at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. As a result, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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