Sir John Brian Pendry, FRS HonFInstP (born 4 July 1943[2][3]) is an English theoretical physicist known for his research into metamaterials and creation of the first practical "Invisibility Cloak".

[5] John Pendry was born in Manchester, where his father was an oil representative, and took a degree in Natural Sciences at the Downing College, Cambridge after which he was appointed as a research fellow, between 1969 and 1975.

He spent time at Bell Labs in 1972–3 and was head of the theory group at the SERC Daresbury Laboratory from 1975 to 1981, when he was appointed to the chair in theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

At Bell Labs, Pendry worked with Patrick Lee in photoelectron spectroscopy to develop the first quantitative theory of EXAFS, for which he was awarded the Dirac Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1996.

Whilst maintaining his position as the UK's leading theoretical surface physicist, at Imperial he began to study the behaviour of electrons in disordered media and derived a complete solution of the general scattering problem in one dimension and advanced techniques for studying higher dimensions, which are relevant to conductivity of bio-molecules.

[21] An article in Physical Review Letters in 2000 which extended work done by Russian scientist Victor Veselago and suggested a simple method of creating a lens whose focus was theoretically perfect, has become his most cited paper.

[23] In 2009 he and Stefan Maier received a large grant from the Leverhulme Trust to develop the ideas of perfect lens and invisibility cloak in the optical range of light.

Pendry, Sheldon Schultz [de] and David R. Smith were selected as Clarivate Citation laureates in Physics "for their prediction and discovery of negative refraction.

In 2014, he was a co-recipient of the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, with Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, and Thomas Ebbesen of the University of Strasbourg.