• Robert Whiting, 40, admitted causing the death of cyclist Dr Ling Felce, 35, on March 1st.
• He’d ingested cocaine the night before and was more than eight times over the limit.
• Whiting has never held a full driver’s licence and his provisional licence expired in 2002.

A lorry driver who was unqualified and uninsured when he killed an Oxford University scientist while more than eight times over the drug-drive limit was sentenced.

Robert Whiting, 40, admitted causing the death of cyclist Dr Ling Felce, 35, on March 1st at The Plain roundabout in Oxford.

He’d ingested cocaine the night before.

A judge described his lengthy criminal record as “dire,” and he was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Whiting was driving a 32-tonne lorry owned by Oxford-based company J&A Driveways at the time of the crash, according to Oxford Crown Court.

The mother-of-two was visible to Whiting for 700m (2,300ft) before the crash, according to a police investigator, as they both travelled down Headington Road and St Clement’s Street before arriving at The Plain.

The court heard that Dr. Felce, who was waiting to use the roundabout, was killed instantly.

Whiting has never held a full driver’s licence, and his provisional licence expired in 2002.

He was first prohibited from driving for a year in 2002, and he was convicted of additional driving offences in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2016.

He was also scheduled to appear in court for driving without a licence and without insurance after police stopped him in Oxford’s Rymers Lane in December.

Police and the Health and Safety Executive are looking into J&A Driveways.

Dr. Felce was born in Malaysia in 1986 and moved to London with her parents and younger sister in 1991. She began studying biochemistry in Oxford in 2005 and earned a DPhil in clinical pharmacology at Oxford University.

Oxford University described her as a scientist of “extraordinary talent,” and she had been studying immune responses to Covid for months before her death.

The CAMS-Oxford Institute recently announced the Ling Felce Award, which will provide financial support to “the next generation of world-leading computational biologists.”

Dr. Felce’s husband, James, stated in March, “I actually went past the crash site about an hour and a half after it happened, but I didn’t know it was Ling.”