James Binney

Education and career

Binney was educated at King's College School, Wimbledon, and then studied the Mathematical Tripos at Churchill College, Cambridge, graduating with a first in 1971. He then moved to the University of Oxford, reading for a D.Phil. at Christ Church under Dennis Sciama, which he completed in 1975. After holding several post-doctoral positions, including a junior research fellowship at Magdalen College, and a position at Princeton University, Binney returned to Oxford as a university lecturer and fellow and tutor in physics at Merton College in 1981. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton from 1983 to 1987 and again in the fall of 1989. He was subsequently made ad hominem reader in theoretical physics in 1991 and professor of physics in 1996.

Binney has received a number of awards and honours for his work, including the Maxwell Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1986, the Brouwer Award of the American Astronomical Society in 2003, the Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics in 2010, the Eddington Medal in 2013, and the Isaac Newton Medal in 2023. He has been a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society since 1973, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of the Institute of Physics, both in 2000. In 2022, Binney was elected an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

In 2025, Binney received the Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal for Astronomy for his lifetime achievements in the study of the structure and evolution of galaxies.