ProfessorPeter Haynes, FREng

Peter is Professor of Theory and Simulation of Materials, a post held jointly between the departments of Materials and Physics and associated with the Thomas Young Centre. His research interests focus on the development of new methods for performing first-principles quantum-mechanical simulations and their application to materials science, nanotechnology and biological systems.

Peter's work has mainly focussed on methods for large-scale simulations where the computational effort scales linearly with system-size. He is an author of the ONETEP code and was awarded the Maxwell Medal and Prize for Computational Physics by the Institute of Physics in 2010. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021.

Peter's interests have more recently expanded to include methods for simulating molecules and materials on emerging quantum computers, in collaboration with the Imperial Centre for Quantum Engineering, Science and Technology and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.

Peter studied Natural Sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge, specialising in Theoretical Physics, and completed his doctorate in the Theory of Condensed Matter group at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1998. After that he held the Thomas Nevile Research Fellowship at Magdalene College, the Ramon Jenkins Senior Research Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College and was a Royal Society University Research Fellow from 2005 until 2013. He joined Imperial College London in June 2007.

For more information, watch his inaugural lecture.