Professor Ruth Lynden-Bell FRS, 1937-2026
Chemist and former College Acting President dies aged 88
The College is deeply saddened to announce the death this week of Professor Ruth Lynden-Bell, chemist and Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College. She was 88.
In addition to two periods as a Fellow of the College, Ruth was Acting President from 2011 to 2013.
Alongside her internationally-recognised academic achievements, Ruth was a courageous and longstanding champion of flexibility for women in science to enable a balance between career and home life.
Further details about her funeral and memorial will be shared in due course, as will a full obituary detailing Ruth's remarkable career.
The Professor Ruth Lynden-Bell lecture will take place in College on Tuesday 12 May 2026, providing an opportunity to mark Ruth's legacy.
Ruth, then Ruth Truscott, came to Cambridge in 1956 as an 18-year-old undergraduate to study Natural Sciences at Newnham. It was immediately clear she was an outstanding student.
After graduation in 1959, she began research in the Department of Chemistry as an Experimental Spectroscopist using a new machine – a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance instrument or NMR. Pioneering new techniques would become a pattern in her career. ‘This was the very beginning of magnetic resonance without the imaging,’ she explained in a College interview.
‘Cambridge had the first commercial instrument in the country, and I joined a group working with it. It was a very new subject, and the goal was to understand the spectra of very simple compounds.’
In 1961 Ruth married Donald Lynden-Bell, a theoretical astrophysicist who later became President of the Royal Astronomical Society. The following year, now as Ruth Lynden-Bell, she gained her doctorate in Chemistry from Cambridge and joined New Hall - then in its first home in Silver Street, Cambridge - as a Fellow and College Lecturer. She left three years later when Donald gained a job at the new University of Sussex, securing a ground-breaking part-time job at the same institution to balance her beloved research with caring for the couple's children.
In 1972, the family returned to Cambridge when Donald was appointed Chair of Astrophysics, and Ruth was welcomed back to New Hall as a Fellow once more. The College teaching arrangement was designed to allow Ruth to carve out time in the mornings for research in the Department of Chemistry. The focus of her work was how molecules move in a liquid, and she joined the cadre of New Hall trailblazers, pioneering computer simulation as a way of testing theories. In doing so, she made possible crucial developments in the knowledge of the properties of liquids and disordered solids.
‘Nowadays,’ Ruth explained, ‘anyone can use a package to do a simulation and generate a trajectory showing how the molecules move. The challenge is to ask the right questions and think about the meaning of the results.’
In 1995, with her children now grown, Ruth moved to Queen's University Belfast as a co-founder of the interdisciplinary Atomistic Simulation Group (now the Atomistic Simulation Centre). In 2003, she returned to Cambridge, where she continued her work – unpaid – on ionic liquids.
Ruth would make a further vital and unexpected contribution, guiding and steering the College, by now Murray Edwards, as Acting President in 2010-2013.
In 2006, Ruth was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for her ‘crucial advancements in our knowledge of the properties of liquids and disordered solids’. The citation praised her ‘clear and elegant work and well-supported explanations’.
In 2017, she was awarded the Lennard-Jones Lectureship for her work in Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics. And in a further recognition of her achievements in this field, the Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry created the biannual Ruth Lynden-Bell PhD prize for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
In 2024, Murray Edwards inaugurated the Ruth Lynden-Bell Lecture in her honour.
Throughout her career, Ruth advocated for women seeking to balance work and home life. In one interview, she offered two pieces of advice: 'Don’t be afraid to ask for things such as part time work. Apart from the Belfast job, every job I got was by asking for it', and, 'When opportunities arise take them: it’s worth trying. I never imagined going to Belfast'.
The College sends heartfelt condolences to Ruth's family.