The
Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science is a chair at the
University of Oxford. The chair was established in 1995 for the
ethologist Richard Dawkins by an endowment from
Charles Simonyi. The aim of the Professorship is "to communicate science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding". It is a position that had been endowed by
Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.