Council For Assisting Refugee Academics - Prominent Academics Assisted By AAC/SPSL/CARA

Prominent Academics Assisted By AAC/SPSL/CARA

Amongst the 1,500 academics assisted in the early years, sixteen went on to win Nobel Prizes, eighteen received Knighthoods, well over a hundred were elected as Fellows of The Royal Society and The British Academy, and many more became leaders in their respective fields.

• Sir Walter Bodmer, a prominent human geneticist who is also credited with expanding public understanding of the sciences.
• Sir Hermann Bondi, a mathematician who helped develop radar and influenced relativity theory, served as Chief Scientist to two UK government departments and as Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
• Max Born became the Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and won the Nobel Prize in 1954 for his pioneering work in quantum mechanics.
• Sir Ernst Chain won the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his shared work on penicillin.
• Sir Geoffrey Elton, a historian and philosopher of history, helped to advance understanding of the Tudor government.
• Sir Ernst Gombrich brought fundamental questions of aesthetics in art to scholarly and public attention.
• Sir Ludwig Guttmann and his family were helped to emigrate from Nazi Germany in 1939. SPSL negotiated with the Home Office on their behalf, donated a sum of £250 (equivalent to around £10,000 in today's money) and helped them to establish themselves in Oxford. Here they stayed in the family of home of Lord Lyndsay, SPSL Councillor and Master of Balliol College. Guttmann went on to found the National Spinal Injuries Clinic in Stoke Mandeville Hospital where he revolutionised the treatment of those with spinal injury and went on to establish what would go on to become the Paralympics.
• Sir Peter Hirsch modernized the study of materials science and engineering at Oxford University.
• Sir Otto Kahn-Freund was a leading theorist and practitioner of labour law.
• Sir Bernard Katz won the Nobel Prize in 1950 for shared research on mechanisms of neuro-muscular transmission.
• Sir Hans Kornberg works on the nature and regulation of carbohydrate transport in micro-organisms and advises Parliament on science and technology.
• Sir Hans Krebs won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for his shared research into the complex sequence of metabolic chemical reactions known as the Krebs Cycle.
• Sir Claus Moser, a prominent statistician, directed the Central Statistics Office and served as Pro-Vice Chancellor of Oxford University.
• Sir Rudolf Peierls taught theoretical physics at Birmingham and Oxford and was involved in both the development of atomic weaponry and the Pugwash anti-nuclear movement.
• Max Perutz won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 for shared research into the structure of haemoglobin which added to our understanding of diseases of the blood.
• Sir Nikolaus Pevsner brought new perspectives on the UK's architectural heritage to scholars and the wider public.
• Sir Karl Popper, a hugely influential political and social philosopher, was a critic of totalitarianism in all its forms.
• Sir Francis Simon pioneered research in thermodynamics and low-temperature physics at Oxford's Clarendon Laboratory.
• Albie Sachs was helped by SPSL in 1966, and again in 1988.
• Jack Mapanje