A physics professor who pioneered research into semiconductors has died at the age of 65.

Tony Stradling was born in Solihull in Warwickshire in 1937.

In 1955, he studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, on an Open Scholarship.

He made his name as a lecturer in physics at the Clarendon Laboratory, where he started a research programme in the 1960s on semiconductors.

He rapidly established the Clarendon as a world-leading laboratory for the study of the electrical properties and spectroscopy of semiconductors.

In 1978, he became Professor of Natural Philosophy and chairman of the School of Physical Sciences at St Andrews University.

In 1982, he became the first chairman of the Institute of Physics' semiconductor physics group.

He was also a founding editor of Semiconductor Science and Technology.

Two years later, at the invitation of Imperial College London, he established a research programme on semiconductor physics.

An international scientist, his work achieved greater recognition in Japan, the USA and Russia than in the UK.

Prof Stradling was known as a dedicated and occasionally eccentric worker.

He travelled from Oxford to London daily and still arrived hours before many of his colleagues, but on more than one occasion it had to be pointed out to him that he was wearing odd shoes -- one black and one brown.

Although retired at the time of his death on November 26, Prof Stradling planned to continue his research work in a new role as Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College, London.