Ronald Wilfrid Gurney was a British theoretical, solid-state, and chemical physicist and research pupil of Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University during the 1920s. He moved to Princeton University in 1926-1928 on a International Education Board and Commonwealth Fund fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to work with Karl Compton. He was granted a Japanese research fellowship to work at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research for 1929. Upon returning to England in 1930, he first worked as a researcher at Cambridge University and then moved to the University of Manchester as a teaching fellow. He was appointed as a George Wills Research Associateship at Bristol University in 1933 and worked with Nevill Mott. He moved to the US after the start of World War II, where he died in New York City.