Department of Materials, University of Oxford

The Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England was founded in the 1950s as the Department of Metallurgy, by William Hume-Rothery, who was a reader in Oxford's Department of Inorganic Chemistry. It is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division

Around 190 staff work in the Department of Materials full-time, including professors, lecturers, independent fellows, researchers and support staff. There are around 30 academic staff positions of which four are Chairs.

The Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy was set up in the late 1950s. Professor Sir Peter Hirsch formerly held the chair. The current holder of the chair is Peter Bruce FRS. Other Chairs in the Department include the Vesuvius Chair of Materials held by Patrick Grant FREng, Professor in the Physical Examination of Materials formerly held by David Cockayne FRS and the James Martin Chair in Energy Materials held by .

Oxford Materials is a research intensive department, achieving 6* status^{[clarification needed]} in a research assessment exercise. Research is done in the broad fields of structural and nuclear materials, device materials, polymers and biomaterials, nanomaterials, processing and manufacturing, characterization, and computational materials modelling.

The Department offers undergraduate degrees in Materials Science and Materials, Economics and Management, having around 160 undergraduates, and around 240 postgraduate students, particularly DPhil students pursuing advanced research.^[1]

In addition to its own buildings, the Department shares 7 buildings with the Department of Engineering Science on a triangular plot with Banbury Road to the west and Parks Road to the east. In addition, the Department has extensive facilities at Begbroke Science Park, north of the city, which was purchased and founded on behalf of the University by Professor Brian Cantor when he was Head of the Department in the 1990s.

History[]

The Department of Metallurgy was founded in the mid 1950s by Professor Hume-Rothery. In the early 1950s, Hume-Rothery was a Reader in Metallurgy in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, and Metallurgy was taught as an option in the Chemistry degree. The department was initially housed in a hut in Keble Road, until new accommodation, the Hume-Rothery building was completed in 1960. Since then, the department has gradually expanded into a total of almost 8,000 sq m, distributed over 7 buildings in the Keble Road Triangle, just north of the city centre. In December 1999, it acquired another 6,500 sq m, distributed over more than 10 buildings at the (subsequently renamed) Oxford University Begbroke Science Park (OUBSP), 5 miles away, just north of the ring road, half occupied by the departments industry-linked research, and half occupied by high-tech spin-out materials related companies. At first the Metallurgy course was heavily based on Chemistry, but gradually the Chemistry input decreased. The Metallurgy degree was substantially revamped in the late 1960s, following Professor Hume-Rotherys retirement.