Neil Barclay is Emeritus Professor of Chemical Pathology in the Dunn School. He arrived in Oxford as an undergraduate in 1969 to study Biochemistry, and undertook a DPhil in the same department supervised by Alan Williams.

After a post-doctoral position in Sweden, he returned to Oxford to work on monoclonal antibodies with Williams, who had just been appointed head of the MRC Cellular Immunology Unit within the Dunn School. Barclay pioneered the sequencing of proteins on the surface of cells of the immune system that had been isolated through the use of monoclonal antibodies.

In 2010 he succeeded George Brownlee as EP Abraham Professor of Chemical Pathology. He set up the CIU Trust to manage royalties from sales of monoclonal antibodies generated within the Cellular Immunology Unit, and through this has partially endowed the Barclay Williams Chair in Molecular Immunology. He is also Chair of the EPA Cephalosporin Fund, and has founded a company, Everest Biotech, that is based in Nepal and uses goats to generates antibodies against human proteins for research.