ProfessorTony Paxton

As of March 1st 2022, I am a Senior Research Investigator in the Department of Materials. I was formerly Chair in Computational Materials Science at King's College London, Department of Physics, and am now Emeritus Professor there: see tonypaxton.org.

Principal interests are structure property relations in metals and alloys especially from the electronic structure point of view. I was an investigator in two large consortia of academic and industry partners which finished in 2020. One is HEmS, (under an EPSRC programme grant) studying the behaviour of hydrogen in steel and in particular the phenomenon of hydrogen embrittlement. The other is the EPSRC large grant, Designing Alloys for Resource Efficiency - a manufacturing approach, (DARE) along with Fionn Dunne and David Dye of Imperial College, which was announced in September 2014. I am also active in the theory and modelling of molecular processes in water and on surfaces. A research project on the theory of corrosion with Andrew Horsfield started in Dec 2017. A UKRI grant, with Mark Rainforth in Sheffield, began in Feb 2021: see martensite.org. Another UKRI grant with Mark Rainforth began in September 2025, on the subject of Designing Steels for Impurity Tolerance.

My favorite theory is the polarisable ion tight binding approximation which I helped to invent along with Mike Finnis.

My two books are: Anthony T. Paxton, Electrode and Corrosion Physics, World Scientific Europe Ltd, 272pp (2024); Anthony T. Paxton, Fundamentals of Transport Phenomena, Cambridge University Press , 274 pp (2025)

(updated 16 Feb 2026)