Rate My Professor Richard Berry

Professor Richard Berry, D.Phil., is Professor of Biological Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. He earned his first degree and D.Phil. in Physics from the University of Oxford. His postdoctoral career began with a Wellcome Trust Prize Travelling Research Fellowship, which he held in the Biochemistry Department at Oxford and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. Subsequently, he was a research fellow at King’s College London before joining the University of Oxford Physics Department as a University Lecturer in 2000, advancing to his current professorial position. Berry also serves as a Tutorial Fellow in Physics at St Catherine’s College since 2000.

Berry leads the Oxford Molecular Motors research group, located at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery. His research centers on the physics of large molecular machines essential to life processes, particularly rotary molecular motors such as the bacterial flagellar motor and F₁F₀ ATP-synthase. He investigates torque generation, motor assembly, maintenance, control, and function in living cells. Employing cutting-edge techniques like optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, laser dark-field microscopy, interferometry, and digital holographic microscopy, his work extends to developing tools for medical diagnostics, lipid bilayer systems, synthetic biology, and biophysical instrumentation. Berry lectures on Biological Physics in undergraduate and fourth-year courses, heads the Biophysics Practical laboratories in the Physics Department, provides physics tutorials at St Catherine’s College, and supervises doctoral students.

Notable publications include “Structure and mechanism of the Zorya anti-phage defence system” (Nature, 2024), “Molecular structure of the intact bacterial flagellar basal body” (Nature Microbiology, 2021), “A new class of biological ion-driven rotary molecular motors with 5:2 symmetry” (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2022), and “Towards a perfusion system for functional study of membrane proteins with independent control of the electrical and chemical transmembrane potential” (Biophysical Reviews, 2025).