Announcing our new Honorary Fellows
9 September 2026
We are delighted to announce the election of three new Honorary Fellows: Professor Fernando Alday, Professor Patrick Roche and Professor Richard Thomas.
Luis Fernando Alday is renowned for the development of mathematical tools to understand fundamental questions in Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Gravity. His most important contributions involve surprising dualities among different theories and observables in high energy theoretical physics, which had a transformative effect on their areas. More recently, Fernando has been developing mathematical tools to compute string and M-theory amplitudes in curved space-time, a subject still in its infancy.
Fernando is a recipient of the Royal Society’s Wolfson Research Merit Award and the LMS Whitehead prize. Since 2020 he is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and head of the Mathematical Physics Group at the University of Oxford, and since 2022 he is a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Patrick Roche graduated from University College London with a BSc in 1976 and a PhD in 1982. He worked at the Anglo-Australian Observatory from 1979 to 1985, before returning to UCL as a research fellow. He relocated to the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in 1986, before moving to work in Oxford on a two-year secondment in 1989 on a proposal for a UK 8-m telescope. The proposal was approved and led to the UK involvement in the Gemini Observatory, and his role as UK Project Scientist during the telescope construction from 1995 to 2001.
He was appointed as a University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Hertford College in 1996, and served as Interim Principal from November 2024 to March 2026.
Richard Thomas was a Junior Research Fellow at Hertford from 1997 to 2000, following a DPhil in Oxford, supervised by Sir Simon Donaldson FRS, from 1994 to 1997. Together they defined what are now known as ‘Donaldson-Thomas invariants’, which have become a big topic in both mathematics and theoretical physics. He is currently a Royal Society research professor at Imperial College London, studying the geometry of the high-dimensional curved spaces used in string theory to describe possible models for a ‘grand unified theory of physics’.
Together with Soheyla Feyzbakhsh, he was awarded the 2025 Osvald Veblen Prize of the American Mathematical Society for their work showing that Donaldson-Thomas theory can be solved in terms of its simplest ‘abelian’ version which counts curves in the geometric space under study. He has also been elected a fellow of the Royal Society (2015), the American Mathematical Society (2018) and Academia Europaea (2019).
Hertford’s Principal, Alexandra Freeman, said:
‘Firstly, I am delighted that we can recognise formally the dedication that Pat Roche has shown to Hertford, responding to the call to return to be Interim Principal whilst actually on holiday celebrating his retirement! We are also proud to celebrate the successes of two great Hertford mathematicians, and look forward to the contribution they will make to the intellectual community here in college.’