Do we like Brian Cox?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and plenty of public-good advocacy, but the record on LGBTQ+ topics is thin, so it stops short of the top.
Brian Cox is the particle physicist who made the cosmos a primetime thing, fronting series like Universe and The Planets while holding down a professor's job at the University of Manchester. This month he picked up the 2026 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, presented by Starmus co-founders Brian May and Garik Israelian.
The live fight is over money. When the UK's science funding body cut particle, nuclear and astrophysics grants this year, Cox said on X the cuts would be devastating and had not been thought through. He later told the Guardian the impact amounted to “destruction of the future”.
He is not alone: the Commons science committee chair called the cuts wholly unacceptable, while the science minister called the missed funding deadline a mistake and said postdoc money is still available. The funding body's line is that its training budget is rising. Cox has been on this beat for more than a decade, having criticised research cuts back in 2014 too.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up. On the planet, he has called for a CERN-style international body for the environment, and in 2016 he welcomed Australia reinvesting in climate research. Fair warning though: our searches found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ or trans issues, so that one is silence rather than a tick.
On the good-person side the record is quiet, which is a compliment. We found no court outcomes, regulator rulings or credible allegations about him, though a couple of tabloid-style items about old tweets were not something we could verify, so we left them out.
The good stuff is mostly what he does best: getting people excited about physics and defending the funding that keeps the next generation of scientists employed. That is a decent use of a famous face, even if it is not the same as campaigning for LGBTQ+ people directly.