David Wark is a physicist internationally recognised for his work on the properties of neutrinos. Through his involvement in numerous international collaborations, David helped to provide experimental evidence for the mass of the electron neutrino, amongst other significant achievements.

Neutrinos are known to exist in three distinct types or ‘flavours’ and for many years scientists considered it impossible to convert a neutrino of one flavour into another. Observations conducted at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, however, where David served as co-spokesperson, revealed that such transformations can indeed occur through a phenomenon known as neutrino mixing.

David previously served as Professor of High Energy Physics at Imperial College London and Director of the Particle Physics Division at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory before taking up a senior position at Balliol College, Oxford. As an international authority on neutrino physics, he was awarded the Rutherford Prize by the Institute of Physics in 2004.