Amyand "David" Buckingham, CBE, FRS (born 28 January 1930 in Pymble, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) is a chemist, with primary expertise in chemical physics. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and Emeritus Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He obtained a B.Sc. and M. Sc., under Professor R. J. W. Le Fèvre, from the University of Sydney and a Ph. D. from the University of Cambridge supervised by John Pople. He was a 1851 Exhibition Senior Student in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford from 1955–57, Lecturer and then Student (Fellow) at Christ Church, Oxford from 1955–65 and University Lecturer in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory from 1958 - 65. He was Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Bristol from 1965 - 69. He was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge in 1969.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1975) and a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1992). He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
Professor Buckingham's research has focussed on the measurement and understanding of the electric, magnetic and optical properties of molecules; as well as on the theory of intermolecular forces. He was the first to measure the value of a molecular quadrupole moment, that of the carbon dioxide molecule (CO2).[1]
He was awarded the first Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences for pioneering contributions to the molecular sciences in 2006.
He also played 10 first class cricket matches for Cambridge University between 1955 and 1960, scoring 349 runs including 2 half centuries at an average of 18.36.