Binney was educated at
King's College School, Wimbledon, and then studied the
Mathematical Tripos at
Churchill College, Cambridge, graduating with a
first in 1971. He then moved to the
University of Oxford, reading for a
D.Phil. at
Christ Church under
Dennis Sciama, which he completed in 1975. After holding several post-doctoral positions, including a junior research fellowship at
Magdalen College, and a position at
Princeton University, Binney returned to Oxford as a university lecturer and fellow and tutor in physics at
Merton College in 1981. He was a visiting scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton from 1983 to 1987 and again in the fall of 1989. He was subsequently made ad hominem reader in theoretical physics in 1991 and professor of physics in 1996. Binney has received a number of awards and honours for his work, including the
Maxwell Prize of the
Institute of Physics in 1986, the
Brouwer Award of the
American Astronomical Society in 2003, the
Dirac Medal of the
Institute of Physics in 2010, the
Eddington Medal in 2013, and the
Isaac Newton Medal in 2023. He has been a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society since 1973, and was made a
Fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of the Institute of Physics, both in 2000. In 2022, Binney was elected an International Member of the US
National Academy of Sciences. In 2025, Binney received the
Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal for Astronomy for his lifetime achievements in the study of the structure and evolution of galaxies. ==Interests==