Michael Pepper

Pepper was born on 10 August 1942 to Morris and Ruby Pepper (née Bloom), Morris was the son of Herschel (Harris) and Rebecca Pepper, who were both Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants living in the East End. He was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School, a grammar school in the City of Westminster, London that has since closed. He then went on to study physics at the University of Reading and graduated Bachelor of Science (BSc) in 1963. He remained at Reading to undertake postgraduate studies and completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1967.

In 1987, while an academic of the University of Cambridge, he was granted the status of Master of Arts (MA Cantab). He was awarded a higher doctorate, Doctor of Science (ScD), by Cambridge.

Sir Michael was a physicist at the Plessey Research Laboratories when he formed a collaboration with Sir Nevill Mott, (Nobel Laureate, 1977) which resulted in his commencing research in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1973 on localisation in semiconductor structures. He subsequently joined the GEC Hirst Research Centre where he set up joint Cambridge-GEC projects. He was one of three authors on the paper that eventually brought a Nobel prize for the quantum Hall effect to Klaus von Klitzing. Sir Michael formed the Semiconductor Physics research group at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1984, and following a period as Royal Society Warren Research Fellow was appointed to his current role, Professorship of Physics, at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1987. In 1991, he was appointed managing director of the newly established Toshiba Cambridge Research Centre, now known as the Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) of Toshiba Research Europe. The following year, 2001, he was appointed Scientific Director of TeraView, a company formed by spinning off the terahertz research arm of CRL. He became an honorary Professor of Pharmaceutical Science in the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2003. He left his Cambridge Chair to take up the Pender Chair of Nanoelectronics at University College London in 2009 and has been associated with many developments in Semiconductor Physics and applications of terahertz radiation. He sits on the Scientific Advisory Committee of Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies.