Patrick’s research takes place at the interface between advanced materials and manufacturing. Particular applications include electrodes for energy storage and advanced metallics for power generation. Many of his research projects are concerned with solidification behaviour in complex alloys, and/or the use of liquid metal, ceramic or polymer droplet and powder sprays to create unusual materials. The research makes use a combination of experimentation on large scale facilities, on-line process diagnostics and numerical simulation. All the research work involves close collaboration with industry.
Patrick received a B.Eng in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Nottingham University and a D.Phil in Materials from Oxford University. After holding a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and then Lectureship in the Department of Materials, Oxford University, he became Vesuvius [1] Professor of Materials in 2004. Patrick is a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng), a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM), and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
From 1999 to 2004, Patrick was Director of the Oxford Centre for Advanced Materials and Composites (OCAMAC) and was Director of the government funded Faraday Advance transport network for materials from 2000 until 2007, and Executive Director of the Transport Node of the Materials KTN until 2014. He was one of the founding academics of the Begbroke Science Park at Oxford University, now a major regional and international hub for innovation and close industrial-university collaboration. He was Deputy Head of the Maths, Physical and Life Sciences Division at Oxford University 2012-14, and Head of the Department of Materials 2015-18. In October 2018, he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research.
Patrick is PI of the Faraday Institution funded Nextrode Project, formed to research new methods for manufacturing smarter electrodes and to put them onto the path to commercialisation. The Nextrode consortium will address a range of crucial scientific and industrial challenges. It will investigate what happens to constituent materials as electrodes are formed, and how this can be controlled; it will be a test bed for radical new manufacturing methods; and it will pioneer new ways, based on data science, to translate small-volume, lab-scale manufacturing into high-volume environments.
1. Vesuvius, headquartered in London and formerly part of Cookson Group, is a global leader in metal flow engineering, principally serving the steel and foundry industries. The Chair was endowed at Oxford University in 1989.
