With immense sadness, we announce the passing of our highly valued colleague Clifford Hicks, who died on Saturday, 7 November 2026, aged 48, after a short illness that came as a surprise to us all. He has been taken far too early.
Cliff was a singular scientist, a true innovator. One of his inventions revolutionized the study of solids under uniaxial pressure. Its influence will live on and grow, as the years go by. Although we know most about that development, invention has always been a central part of Cliff’s work. Countless ideas were sketched out on the ever-present pads of yellow paper (always yellow, no other colour would do!), with the sketches accompanied by quite brilliant numerical estimates of what could be achieved. He attributed much of that skill to a famous estimation course he took as an undergraduate at Caltech, but many people were exposed to that course, and almost none of them used the knowledge as profitably as Cliff.
During his time as a post-doc in St Andrews, Cliff teamed up with two of the graduate students there, Jack Barraclough and Alex Ward, to form Razorbill Instruments. Although the original idea was to commercialise some of Cliff’s other inventions, the demand for his pressure cells soon turned their fabrication into the company’s main business. To date they have sold over 500 pressure rigs, and are still going strong more than a decade after being founded. That is the result of the hard work of a number of people, but Cliff was pivotal to their success.
Although he was a fantastic inventor, Cliff was far more than that. He was an interested and perceptive physicist, full of original ideas which he loved sharing. He was also a very, very nice person, with a unique sense of humor and approach to life, at once playful and serious. He cared deeply about his wife, his friends and the world at large. He was profoundly affected by the birth of his nephew a few years ago, and his thoughts about the future he might have in the face of climate change.
All these traits led Cliff to the last intellectual adventure he was given the time to explore: thinking of ways to improve on existing strategies for carbon capture. He was characteristically serious about this, getting up daily at 5 am to work on it before the start of his standard working day as a condensed matter physics professor at the University of Birmingham. He even spoke about considering founding a start-up company in that area. He had already raised venture capital for initial feasibility studies.
Cliff was a shining example of those who are not content to drift along, meekly accepting the status quo. He was someone held in the greatest professional respect, and many had the privilege of counting him as a personal friend. He will be sorely missed.
On behalf of the members of the CRC/TRR 288