Our Fellowships
Our fellowships were created to bring the most talented early-career theoretical physicists worldwide to Oxford and to give them the intellectual freedom to set their own research agenda.
Intellectual Freedom
Complete freedom of research agenda and choice of collaborators
Compensation and Grants
Competitive salary and grants in line with our global competitors
College Affiliation
The chance to be integrated into the historic collegiate system
About the Programme
By Professor Shivaji Sondhi - Recipient of the Leverhulme International Professorship Award
The Leverhulme-Peierls Fellows Programme responds directly to the challenges of recruiting the best young minds into postdoctoral positions and enabling them to flourish. Our programme at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at Oxford University offers a structured yet supportive environment tailored to their needs.​
Central to the programme is the promise of intellectual freedom. We offer three-year positions, during which fellows are free to explore any area of theoretical physics they choose. Our competitive salaries are among the best in Europe, comparable also with leading institutions in the U.S. We further enrich the fellows' experience by integrating them into Oxford's unique collegiate system, providing them with college affiliations that open doors to the best of Oxford life. Additionally, we foster an esprit de corps among the fellows, encouraging them to develop a cross-disciplinary vision of what a life in physics research could entail.
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As we move forward, the programme stands out not only for its flexible structure, free from the typical constraints of the academic calendar of individual Oxford colleges, but also for its proven success. At the start of term one, we expect a dozen fellows to be in residence at the Beecroft Building. Although this number will decrease slightly as one fellow departs for a professorship at the University of Leuven and another accepts a Royal Society URF at Oxford, the incoming and current fellows represent a diverse and vibrant group. They hail from across the globe, including the United States, Germany, Israel, France, Australia, Japan, and the UK, and cover all our subfields: high-energy physics, condensed matter physics, quantum information, astrophysics, biophysics, plasma physics, and mathematical physics.
The Leverhulme-Peierls Fellows Programme is made possible by the extraordinary generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, through the Leverhulme International Professorship which brought me to Oxford and which extends beyond financial support to allow us operational flexibility crucial for the programme’s success. This generosity is deeply appreciated by all - the fellows, myself, and colleagues across the Department of Physics.
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