Professor Chris Race
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
UKAEA Chair in Fusion Materials
Full contact details
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Sir Robert Hadfield Building
Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
- Profile
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Professor Chris Race is 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. His research group uses the tools of atomistic simulation to investigate the behaviour of a variety of materials and material evolution processes.
Before Chris joined Sheffield in December 2023, he was a Dalton Research Fellow and then Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester. Before that, he 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. Chris completed his 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."
- Research interests
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Microstructural evolution in nuclear materials
Electronic effects in irradiation damage
Mechanisms and kinetics of grain boundary migration