Imperial College London
Department of Materials
Senior Lecturer (and Corus-RAEng Senior Research Fellow) In Steel Processing
Further particulars
1.1 The College
Imperial College London consistently achieves one of the highest rankings nationally and internationally, as listed in the Times Higher QS World University Rankings 2008.
The Rector, Sir Roy Anderson, DSc, FRS FMedSci, is the College’s academic head and chief executive officer. The Chairman of the Court and Council is Lord Kerr of Kinlochard.
1.2 The Mission
Imperial College London embodies and delivers world-class scholarship, education and research in science, engineering and medicine, with particular regard to their application in industry, commerce and healthcare. We foster interdisciplinary working within the College and collaborate widely externally.
1.3 Strategic Intent
· To remain amongst the top tier of scientific, engineering and medical research and teaching institutions in the world.
· To harness the quality and breadth of our research capability, across multiple disciplines, and to address major challenges.
· To develop our range of academic activities to reflect the changing needs of society, industry, commerce and healthcare.
· To continue to attract and develop the most able students and staff worldwide.
· To communicate widely the significance of science in general and the purpose and ultimate benefits of our activities in particular.
1.4 Formation and History
Imperial College was established in 1907 in London’s scientific and cultural heartland in South Kensington, as a merger of the Royal College of Science, the City and Guilds College and the Royal School of Mines. St Mary’s Hospital Medical School and the National Heart and Lung Institute merged with the College in 1988 and 1995 respectively.
Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School and the Royal Postgraduate Medical School merged with the College on 1 August 1997 to form, with the existing departments on the St Mary’s and Royal Brompton campuses, the Faculty of Medicine.
The Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology became a Division of the Faculty of Medicine in 2000. The integration of basic science research and clinical facilities is unique in rheumatology in Europe.
Wye College merged with Imperial in 2000. This merger brought agricultural science to Imperial College for the first time.
Imperial College was an independent constituent part of the University of London up until the end of June 2007. With effect from 1 July 2007, the College has now withdrawn from the University of London to become wholly independent, to coincide with its Centenary year.
In 2007, the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, was formed by merging Hammersmith and St Mary’s Hospitals’ NHS Trusts with the College, forming the country’s largest NHS Trust. This also established the UK’s first Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) bringing together healthcare services, teaching and research for maximum synergistic benefits.
The academic structure of Imperial College has been substantially restructured. All teaching and research activity is divided into three faculties, and the Tanaka Business School. The Faculties of Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Medicine, and the Tanaka Business School are headed by Principals.
1.5 Staff and Students
The academic and research staff of 2,970 includes 68 Fellows of the Royal Society, 69 Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering, 69 Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences, one Fellow of the British Academy, four Crafoord Prize winners and two Fields Medallists. Fourteen Nobel Laureates have been members of the College either as staff or students.
The College has over 12,200 students, around one third of whom are postgraduate. Thirty percent of the total comes from outside the European Union. External assessment of the College’s teaching quality in many different subject areas has been judged to be of high standard. The proportion of women students has increased to 37 percent of the total.
1.6 Research
The quality of the College’s research has been judged consistently to be of the highest international standard and the proportion of income from research grants and contracts is one of the highest of any UK university.
The concentration and strength of research in science, engineering and medicine gives the College a unique and internationally distinctive research presence.
Generous support for the College’s work comes from a wide variety of sources. From industry there are donations towards certain senior academic posts, advanced courses, bursaries and scholarships. The single largest contribution to the College from industrial concerns is in the form of contracts to carry out research. The College also gains considerable support from research councils and charities to undertake research.
1.7 Teaching and Learning
The College’s overall educational aim is to ensure a stretching and exhilarating learning experience and, while maintaining its traditional emphasis on single honours degree courses, it also aims to give students the opportunity to broaden their experience through courses relevant to student and employer needs.
In its MSc course provision, the College seeks to provide a wide range of specialist courses in areas in which it has particular expertise. Many of those offered by non-medicine departments of the College emphasise the valuable interaction between scientific/technological training and industrial experience, whilst those offered by the medical divisions focus on subjects at the interface between basic science and medicine and on specialist education for doctors and other health professionals in training. In addition, the College’s wide range of PhD programmes reflect its aim of pursuing research at the frontiers of scientific, engineering, management and medical knowledge and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of this research.
The Centre for Educational Development has been established to raise and consolidate the profile of learning, teaching and educational development through-out the College. Newly-appointed non-clinical lecturers must enrol upon the Certificate of Advanced Study for Learning and Teaching and there are many learning and teaching activities for more experienced staff.
The Graduate School of Life Sciences and Medicine is the focus of postgraduate education and research in these areas. It maintains, enhances and monitors quality, and disseminates best practice, whilst initiating and developing new programmes, particularly those with an interdisciplinary slant.
The Graduate School of Engineering and Physical Sciences (GSEPS) at Imperial College London was established in February 2002. It is the focus for postgraduate education and research in the Engineering and Natural Science faculties and has quality assurance responsibilities for the two non-faculty departments; Humanities and the Business School.
All Departments visited by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for assessment of their teaching have scored between 21 and 24 points (out of 24) or in the previous system, have been judged excellent.
1.8 Location
The College now has one of the largest operational estates of any UK University. It includes six central London campuses, the main South Kensington campus, Charing Cross campus, Chelsea and Westminster campus, the Hammersmith campus, the Royal Brompton campus and St Mary’s campus.
Silwood Park, a postgraduate campus at Ascot in Berkshire, houses the Ecology and Evolution Section of the Biology Division, in the Department of Life Sciences. The successful Master’s Courses in Crop Protection, Forest Protection and Ecology, Evolution and Conservation are run at Silwood together with the newly created Master’s course in Conservation Science which started in October 2007, and there is a thriving postgraduate community. The campus houses excellent research facilities and a wide range of natural environments. The NERC funded Centre for Population Biology is also based at Silwood, together with a Business Centre.
2.0 The Faculty of Engineering
The Faculty of Engineering is one of three faculties within Imperial College London and is led by the Principal, Professor Stephen Richardson. It comprises 10 Departments together with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, and is one of the largest engineering faculties in the UK, with around 1,200 staff, over 5,000 students and research income of £60M. In the 2008 Times Higher Education Supplement World University Rankings Imperial was placed 2nd in the UK and Europe and 7th in the world for Engineering and IT Universities.
The faculty has the largest number of academic staff in the 5* category in the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), the benchmark of research quality for all higher education departments in the country. A 5* rating indicates that the quality of research is of international excellence in a majority of sub-areas of activity and of national calibre in all others.
The Faculty offers courses in the complete range of engineering disciplines, with members of the Faculty working with people studying and researching every aspect of engineering.
The Faculty of Engineering is based at South Kensington and comprises ten departments covering all aspects of engineering:
· Aeronautics
· Bioengineering
· Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology
· Civil and Environmental Engineering
· Computing
· Earth Science and Engineering
· Electrical and Electronic Engineering
· Materials
· Mechanical Engineering
· Institute of Biomedical Engineering
The Faculty was formed in August 2001 and formally inaugurated in August 2002.
3.0 The Department of Materials
The Department of Materials at Imperial College London is the oldest and largest department of its kind in the UK. We have a teaching quality assessment score of 24/24 and received an excellent profile in the 2008 RAE with 20% of our research being ranked world leading.
3.1 Research in the Department
Imperial College London has invested over £20M in the last 4 years on the Royal School of Mines/Bessemer buildings complex and the Materials Department moved into this outstanding, newly refurbished accommodation in Summer 2005. The academic year to September 2006 was an important one for the Department with the arrival of Professor Bill Lee as Head of the Department in January along with Professor Mike Finnis from the Physics Department at Queens University, Belfast. In addition, Jason Riley from the Chemistry Department at Bristol University as Senior Lecturer in Materials Chemistry, Luc Vandeperre as Lecturer in the Environmental Impact of Materials.
This expansion in academic staff numbers continued in 2007 with the following appointments: Dr Sandrine Heutz (from the Physics Department at University College London) as Lecturer-designate (started January 2007), Professor Neil Alford as Professor of Physical Electronics and Thin Film Materials, (started January 2007), Dr Yeong-Ah Soh from Dartmouth College, USA as London Centre of Nanotechnology (LCN) Lecturer in Thin Films (started July 2007), Dr Alexandra Porter (lecturer in Biomaterials started October 2007), Dr Alison Harrison (LCN lecturer in Nanometrology started August 2007) and Dr Andrew Horsfield as RCUK Fellow (started February 2007). In addition, we have made a number of appointments in Theory and Simulation of Materials and all joint with Physics: Dr Peter Haynes from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, as Reader and Royal Society Research Fellow (started June 2007), Dr Paul Tangney from University of California at Berkeley, USA as RCUK Fellow (started September 2007), Dr Arash Mostofi from MIT, USA as RCUK Fellow (started October 2007) and Martyn McLachlan as EPSRC/RAEng Fellow in Nanostructured Photovoltaics (started July 2007). Dr Finn Giuliani who commence his appointment as a Joint Lecturer in the Department of Materials and the Department of Mechanical Engineering in Structural Ceramics (April 2009). This is indeed an exciting time to be researching Materials at Imperial College.
The Department has internationally leading research programmes in the synthesis, processing, microstructure, properties and modelling of a broad range of materials (metals, ceramics, semiconductors, glasses, metal- glass- and ceramic- matrix composites) directed to diverse applications such as nuclear, solid oxide fuel cells, aerospace, biomedical, automotive and electronic. We plan to enhance the quality of our research by continuing to appoint people of international standing and by building on the already extensive links to other Departments and Research Institutes in the College and worldwide including Imperial College’s Energy Futures Laboratory, the Composites Centre, the LCN; the Thomas Young Centre for Materials Theory and Simulation; the UK’s Keeping the Nuclear Option Open consortium; the UK Centre for Structural Ceramics; the AtlanTICC Alliance (with ORNL and Georgia Institute of Technology); the EU Network of Excellence on ‘Knowledge Based Multifunctional Materials’ and the IDEA League (with ETH Zurich, ParisTech, RWTH Aachen and TU Delft).
Much of our research quality derives from our outstanding undergraduate programme, which continues to grow from strength to strength. During the 2007-08 academic year, we enrolled 84 talented undergraduates bringing our current total to nearly 300. Our total of over 100 PhD students is now higher than ever. The Department has excellent contacts with industry, and receives research support from over 60 companies either as research contracts or student support. The Department's research income is currently in excess of £5M per annum from Research Councils, industry and Government bodies. The Department has spun out 6 start-up companies, one of which, Ceres Power Ltd. spun out in 2001, is a world leader in fuel cell. In the Biomaterials area, we have spun-out the company BioCeramic Therapeutics which is focussed on developing bioactive ceramics and nanostructured scaffolds for regenerative medicine, particularly in the orthopaedic arena.
3.2 Departmental Facilities
The Department houses top class facilities for Materials processing, property measurement and characterisation. Major research equipment includes both scanning and transmission electron microscopes with analytical ability, Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS) systems, Focused Ion Beam (FIB) systems, a hot isostatic press, an isostatic compaction press and an extrusion press. We have state of the art X-ray equipment (including two X-ray micro tomography units) and thermal analysis suites and have just installed a monochromated FEG-STEM Titan microscope with unique analytical capabilities. Almost all areas have been refurbished over the past 5 or so years, with the final refurbishment being the workshop/manufacturing area, which should be completed in Oct. 2009 Most recently the Biomaterials Laboratory (Jan 2009) and laboratories off the RSM-Bessemer ground floor link corridor for Thin Film processing as well as offices and meeting space for the LCN and the Thomas Young Centre for Materials Theory and Simulation (summer 2008) have just been completed.
Our five-year plan includes expanding our current efforts in the following areas:
• Environment (clean up, pollution control and prevention).
• Energy (especially nuclear and fuel cells).
• Biomaterials, Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine.
• Transport (aerospace, land vehicles).
• Novel Electronic Devices (thin films, sensors, photonic crystals).
3.3 Undergraduate Courses
The Department of Materials offers a number of honours degree courses: