Lawrence Challis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Nottingham. His university education and the first years of his academic career were at the University of Oxford (1951–59); he then moved to the University of Nottingham. He was appointed to an established chair in 1971, was Pro-Vice-Chancellor before his retirement in 1998 and is now a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. His current research interests are on the properties of low-dimensional semiconductors. He has published 230 papers and, in 1994, was awarded the Holweck Medal and Prize for his research by the Institute of Physics/French Physical Society. In 1996 he was awarded the OBE for services to scientific research. He has chaired the Royal Society Grant Board for Mathematics and Physics, the Physics Committee of the Science and Engineering Research Council and the Solid State Division of the Institute of Physics. He is currently Honorary Editor of Reports on Progress in Physics and was until recently Chairman of the European Commission Evaluation Panel for Access to Research Infrastructures.