Anne-Christine Davis

Anne-Christine Davis is a British theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. She was the first woman to be appointed a professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at the university. Her research mainly concerns cosmology, astrophysics and string theory.

Davis was a graduate student at Bristol University, under the supervision of W. Noel Cottingham. She obtained her doctorate in 1975. Davis held postdoctoral positions at Durham University (1976-1978) and Imperial College London in the research group of Tom Kibble (1978-1980). Davis worked overseas at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland (where she became the first female theoretician) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1982-1983). Since 1983 she has held positions at DAMTP, Cambridge, and King's College, Cambridge. From 2002 to 2013 she was professor of theoretical physics at DAMTP and from 2013 to 2018 she held the "Professorship of Mathematical Physics (1967)". She has been a member of the general board and the council of the University of Cambridge. Davis was the first female professor in the faculty of mathematics at Cambridge. Davis served as Cambridge University's Gender Equality Champion for STEMM from 2014 to 2017. In 2019 she won the Institute of Physics Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize. Davis was awarded the OBE in the King's Birthday Honors 2024 for her services. In 2026, Davis was selected as a Fellow into the inaugural cohort of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences.