ProfessorRobin Grimes, FRS FREng

Since 2002 Robin has been a Professor and from 2020 the Steele Chair in Energy Materials. In 2023 he was appointed a Nonexecutive Director of the United Kingdon Atomic energy Authority. He was Ministry of Defence Nuclear Chief Scientific Adviser fro 2017 to 2021 and from 2013 - 2018 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Chief Scientific Adviser (https://www.gov.uk/government/people/robin-grimes). He joined the Materials Department at Imperial College in 1995 as Governors'' Lecturer. Prior to this he was Assistant Director of the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory at the Royal Institution. He spent the year 2000 at Los Alamos National Laboratory as Bernd T. Matthias Scholar.

His primary research interest is the application and development of computer simulation techniques to predict structural and dynamic properties of ceramics and metals. Topics of particular interest include radiation damage, nuclear fuels, cladding and waste form behaviour and performance (in collaboration with industry and national laboratories), ionic conductivity and defect processes for fuel cell materials, surface structural processes and interfaces between glass and ceramic.

Since 1984 Robin has authored over 340 peer-reviewed publications. In 2002 he and was awarded the Rosenhain Medal and in 2010 the Griffith Medal of the IOM3. In 2021 he received the American Nuclear Society Mishima Award. From 2008 until 2013 he was Director of the Imperial Centre for Nuclear Engineering and from 2010 to 2013 he was Director of the Imperial College Rolls Royce University Technology Centre in Nuclear Engineering. He was appointed Principal Investigator of the Research Councils Nuclear Champion consortium in 2010. In 2011 he was Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology for their report on Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities, in 2013 was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in 2016 Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and in 2018 a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was appointed Knights Bachelor in the 2022 New Years' honours List.

Robin has published a paper in Science with Bill Nuttall on Generating the Option of a Two-Stage Nuclear Renaissance (Abstract, Reprint, Full Text) and in Nature with colleagues from Cambridge, Open and Lancaster Universities, concerning proliferation risks of the thoriun nuclear fuel cycle (Vol 492, Pages 31–33, 2012).

For Robin's research group's web pages see:

http://abulafia.mt.ic.ac.uk