After wartime work on the British and Canadian Atomic Energy projects, he returned to Cambridge in 1946, where he was awarded a PhD in 1947 and held posts culminating as Reader in Nuclear Physics from 1956–1957.[1] From 1944 to 1959, he was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.[1]
In 1957 he went to the University of Oxford as Professor of Nuclear Physics, and won the Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize the same year.[1] In 1959 he became Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford, and from 1962 to 1976 was head of the Department of Nuclear Physics.[1] While he held his professorship at Oxford, he was a Fellow (there called a Student) of Christ Church, Oxford.[1] He was knighted in 1974.[3] In 2001 the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Oxford, which he had helped to create, was renamed the Denys Wilkinson Building in his honour.[4]
Denys Wilkinson served as chairman for both the Physics III Committee[5] and the Electronic Experiments Committee at CERN.[6]
On leaving Oxford, he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex from 1976 to 1987.[1][7] After his retirement, he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Physics at Sussex in 1987.[1]
Denys Wilkinson's work in nuclear physics included investigation of the properties of nuclei with low numbers of nucleons.[2] He was amongst the first to experimentally test rules relating to isospin.[2] He also applied concepts from physics to the study of bird navigation.[2]
