Former Visiting Fellow Kim Dae-jung, President of South Korea and an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, received the  Nobel Peace Prize (2000).

Nick Shackleton (1937-2006), former Professorial Fellow of the College, was in 1995 awarded the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for his pioneering work on climatic change during the quaternary period. His work and life have now been appraised in the Biographical Memoirs Series of the Royal Society (2011,
 online access). In 1998 he was awarded a Knighthood, at the same time Gillian Beer (President of Clare Hall 1994-2001) was made a Dame, joining a distinguished list of College Knights from earlier years: Brian Pippard, Michael Stoker, Robert Honeycombe and Keith O’Nions.

Gillian Beer has been elected as Fellow to a number of distinguished bodies: the British Academy in 1991; to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001; to the Royal Society of Literature in 2005 and to the American Philosophical Society (2010). Her ground-breaking book Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1984) won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature.

In 1999 Maria Grazia Spillantini, also a permanent Fellow, won the major international American Potamkin Prize for her work on Alzheimer’s disease. John D. Barrow, a noted cosmologist who serves as Vice President of Clare Hall and as Professor of Mathematical Science, has won the Templeton Prize in 2006.