ProfessorPeter Lee

Professor Peter D. Lee joined Imperial College in 1994 after completing his D.Phil. in Materials Science from the University of Oxford. He remained in the department, as the Professor in the area of Metals Processing, until 2011, when he moved to become Director of the Diamond-Manchester Collaboration (DMC) and co-Director of the Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility (MXIF, www.mxif.manchester.ac.uk). In Jan 2015, he became Assistant Director (Physical Sciences) of the Research Complex at Harwell (RCaH, www.rc-harwell.ac.uk), the UK’s Large Facility dedicated to bridging the Physical and Life Sciences disciplines.

Prof. Lee has retained strong links with Imperial with collaborative projects and students in the Depts. of Materials, Earth Sciences and Mechanical Engineering, including the BP-ICAM centre (with Materials & Chemical Engineering), and the EPSRC funded MAPP Advanced Manufacturing Hub (www.mapp.ac.uk).

Prof. Lee has worked in the area of modelling and advanced characterisation of light metals processing for over 25 years, both in academia and industry. Working in Industry, as a Research Scientist at Alcan International''s Kingston R&D Laboratory,he helped establish their Modelling of Shape Castings Programme, both developing analysis software and applying it to the design of many automotive components. He is Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and the Institute of Cast Metals Engineers. He holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and M.A.Sc. in Materials from the University of Toronto, with his undergraduate and master''s thesis focussing on the simulation of ferrous metallurgical processes.

Prof. Lee is now based at UCL and the Research Complex in Harwell and Diamond Light Source, co-leading a group of 40 researchers and support staff. The group is developing new imaging and computational techniques to better understanding microstructure evolution during the forming and in service behaviour of metals and other materials. Over the past 30 years he has supervised over 60 PhD students and 80 PDRA’s. Many of these researchers are now leading academics (at universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Lille, Leicester, NTU-Singapore, Warwick, Shanghai and IIT Bombay) and industrialists (at companies including Alcoa, Rolls-Royce, BP, Shell, GE, Ford and Johnson & Matthey).

Prof. Lee has published over 400 journal articles and has been the Plenary, Keynote or Invited Speaker at over 100 international conferences and he has been Chair of the Technical Committee for many International Conferences. The open source software Prof. Lee and group developed to predict defects in castings, μMatIC, is used by many companies worldwide to help develop new components for more energy efficient transport and gas turbine design. For example, Ford use this software are part of their “Atoms to Engines” project to produce better castings.