Roger Arthur Cowley, FRS,[1] FRSE, FInstP (24 February 1939 – 27 January 2015) was an English physicist who specialised in the excitations of solids.

His father, Cecil Arthur Cowley, was a chartered surveyor, and his mother Mildred Sarah Nash was from a farming family.

During World War II, the family evacuated to Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, later moving to Shenfield and on to Gidea Park, Essex.

On 27 January 2015 Cowley died at a care home in Oxford as a result of a head injury sustained in a bicycle accident a year earlier.

[3] In 1972 Cowley was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the following year he was awarded the inaugural Max Born Prize.