Herbert Huppert


Herbert Eric Huppert is an Australian-born geophysicist living in Britain. He has been Professor of Theoretical Geophysics and Foundation Director, Institute of Theoretical Geophysics, at the University of Cambridge, since 1989 and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, since 1970.

Education and early life

Huppert was born in Sydney and he received his early education at Sydney Boys High School. He graduated in Applied Mathematics from Sydney University with first class Honours, a University medal and the Barker Travelling Fellowship in 1964. He then completed a PhD supervised by John W. Miles at the University of California, San Diego, and came as an ICI Post-doctoral Fellow to DAMTP in Cambridge in 1968.

Career and research

He has published using fluid-mechanical principles in applications to the Earth sciences: in meteorology, oceanography and geology. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1994–99, and has been on the Council of the Royal Society. He was Chairman of a Royal Society Working Group on bioterrorism, which produced a Report entitled 'Making the UK Safer', on 21 April 2004. He was also chair of the European Academies Science Advisory Committee Working Group which produced a report of the European Parliament and President on carbon capture and storage. He was awarded the 2011 Bakerian lecture for his research into geological fluid dynamics. Since 1990 he has held a part-time Professorship at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Awards and honours

Huppert was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987. In 2005 he was the only non-American recipient of a prize from the United States National Academy of Sciences, being awarded the Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship for contributions to the Earth sciences. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Physical Society and the Academia Europaea.

Personal life

His wife, Felicia Huppert whom he married in 1966, is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and a past fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. His sons, Julian and Rowan, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Julian Huppert was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Cambridge from 2010 to 2015.