I am the UKAEA Chair in Fusion Materials and a Royal Society University Research Fellow within the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield. My group uses the tools of atomistic simulation to investigate the behaviour of a variety of materials and material evolution processes.

Before I joined Sheffield in December 2023, I was a Dalton Research Fellow and then Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester. Before that, I spent three years in the Department of Computational Materials Design of the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research (Eisenforschung) (MPIE) in Dusseldorf Germany, latterly as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow. I completed my PhD in 2010, in the Department of Physics, Imperial College London, under the supervision of Adrian Sutton and Matthew Foulkes.

I am a physicist by training and a materials scientist by inclination. I am attracted to materials science by the links it draws between the behaviour of real materials - things we experience and use in our everyday macroscopic lives - and what happens in the microscopic world of atoms and electrons. Materials science involves the application of fundamental theories of physics to solve real-world problems. As a bonus, these problems are often extremely complex, involving a hierarchy of processes across a range of length and time scales. To model them we need to use a broad range of tools, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.