He was Cavendish Professor of Physics from 1971 until 1982 and an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, of which he was the first President.

After working as a scientific officer in radar research during the Second World War, he was appointed as a Demonstrator in Physics at the University of Cambridge in 1946, subsequently becoming a Lecturer in the subject in 1950, a Reader in 1959, and the first John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Physics a year later.

[4] Pippard demonstrated the reality, as opposed to the mere abstract concept, of Fermi surfaces in metals by establishing the shape of the Fermi surface of copper through measuring the reflection and absorption of microwave electromagnetic radiation[5] (see the anomalous skin effect[6]).

The non-local kernel proposed by Pippard,[9][10][11] inferred on the basis of Chambers' non-local generalisation of Ohm's law) can be deduced within the framework of the BCS (Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer) theory of superconductivity[12] (a comprehensive description of the details of the London–Pippard theory can be found in the book by Fetter and Walecka[13]).

Pippard was the doctoral supervisor of Brian David Josephson (awarded PhD in Physics in 1964) who in 1973 received the Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever) for his discovery of what is known as the Josephson effect.