Biography
Pui Him Ip (葉沛謙) is Director of Tutorial Programme at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. He leads a team to build academic partnerships with universities in Hong Kong and USA to facilitate international student mobility, including Hong Kong University's Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Baylor University's Medical Humanities Program. Alongside this role, he is Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity and Research Associate at St Edmund's College in Cambridge. He is also an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Science and Faith based in the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is an elected fellow of the International Society of Science and Religion.
He is PI and Founding Director of the Science as a Contemplative Activity Research Hub. The Hub stages a pioneering interdisciplinary inquiry to advance our understanding of the possible contemplative dimensions in natural science. It has three main interconnected aspects: (1) to offer a historical genealogy of the early Christian understanding of the study of nature as contemplative, (2) to identify important case studies of modern scientists who practice the contemplation of nature (esp. Niels Bohr), (3) to probe the extent contemporary physicists and biologists engage in contemplation in their research through social-scientific studies of scientists. This research has received funding from The Fetzer Institute (2025-26) and John Templeton Foundation (2024-26, as part of the Meaning and Mystery in Science project). As part of this project, Ip is working on a monograph provisionally entitled Physics: A Contemplative Stance, and an edited volume gathering the contributions from the 2-year seminar series he organised as part of the Hub on 'Patristic Philosophy of Nature' (2024-26).
Previously, he held Lectureships in Patristics at King's College London (2022-23) and University of Oxford (2018-19; Lead Tutor in Theology, Christ Church), and postdoctoral research positions at University of Copenhagen (2023-25) and Charles University Prague (2017-18).
After initial studies in Theoretical physics at Imperial College London and Philosophy & Theology at Heythrop College, he completed his PhD in Patristic Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge under Rowan Williams. As a physicist, he was the recipient of a competitive DAAD RISE Award for research at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürrnberg in Germany (2010) and published on a relational Bohmian approach to quantum gravity (in collaboration with Antonio Vassallo & Julian Barbour).
Ip is the author of Origen and the Emergence of Divine Simplicity before Nicaea (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022; pb 2024). His book received 9 reviews in leading journals and has become a standard reference in the field of Early Christian Trinitarian Theology. He is associate editor of two books, Perspectives on Origen and the History of his Reception (Aschendorff Verlag, 2021) and Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras' Thought (James Clark & Co., 2019) and has edited a couple of special journal issues, ‘Re-thinking Origen’ and Theological Genealogies of Modernity’. His research has been published in a range of journals including Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Journal of Theological Studies, Dialog, and Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Modern Theology and the book series Studies in Systematic Theology edited by Ashley Cocksworth and Hanna Reichel (Brill/de Gruyter). For his work on divine simplicity, he received the John Webster-Colin Gunton Memorial Prize in 2016.
He was a member of two completed international research projects: Meaning and Mystery in Science (2024-26, funded by The John Templeton Foundation) and After Science and Religion (2017-19, funded by The Templeton World Charity Foundation). In relation to the second, he contributed an essay, 'Physics as a Spiritual Exercise' , to the field shifting volume After Science and Religion: Fresh Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2022) edited by Peter Harrison and John Milbank. In Denmark, he is the theology representative in the University of Copenhagen Quantum Hub Network, where he (together with Prof. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup) coordinates an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring the cultural and societal dimensions of natural science and emerging technologies.
Pui Him Ip has received invitations to present his research at leading Universities around the world, including Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, King's College London, Copenhagen, Oslo, Tübingen, Australian Catholic University (Rome Campus), Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, and Baylor University.
He is originally from Hong Kong and have lived in Europe since 2002.
