Lay member profile

G David Price OBE was Vice-Provost (Research) at UCL (2007-2022) and is a Professor of Mineral Physics.

David attended Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, and went up to Clare College, Cambridge in 1974. He has an MA and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He was a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar and Research Associate at the University of Chicago, and a Research Fellow at Clare College Cambridge, before moving to UCL in 1983 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. At UCL, he was appointed Professor at the age of 33, and later served as Head of the Department Earth Sciences, and as Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, before being appointed to the position of Vice Provost in 2007.

He was one of the first to establish the now major interdisciplinary field of computational mineral physics. He has published over 300 research papers/chapters, and his work has attracted over 15,000 citations (as reported in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=-BkrFg8AAAAJ&hl=en).

He was awarded the Schlumberger Medal of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain in 1999; the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society of London in 2002; and in 2006 he was awarded the Louis Néel Medal of the European Geosciences Union for “establishing the importance of computational mineral physics in Earth sciences and for outstanding contributions to the physics of the Earth's core". He is a Member of the Academia Europaea, Fellow of the Geological Society of London, and an Elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the Mineralogical Society of America.

He was chair of the Research Policy Committee of the League of European Research Universities, and was the Chair of Panel B (Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Sciences, and Engineering) of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 run by Research England, having been a member of the RAE2008 sub-panel on Earth and Environmental Sciences, chair of the REF2014 sub-Panel in this area.

He was President of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland (2004-6) and has been a Vice-President of the European Mineralogical Union. He has been an editor of Elsevier’s “Earth and Planetary Science Letters” (2005-8). He also has been: a non-executive Director the North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust (2011-15); Chair of Governors of the UCL Academy School (2011-17); a Council Member of the UK’s STFC (2012-19); and was the inaugural Chair of the HEFCE Responsible Metrics Forum (2016-17). He is a Trustee of the Edward Latymer Foundation; a member of the Council of the University of Loughborough; member of the International Advisory Committee of the University of Tohoku, Japan; and a consultant to the Hong Kong University Grant Committee on their Research Assessment Exercise 2026.

He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to Science and Research in January 2023.