Prof. Chris Race

Chris is the UKAEA Chair in Fusion Materials in the School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield. His group uses the tools of atomistic simulation to investigate the behaviour of a variety of materials and material evolution processes.

Before he 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. He completed his PhD in 2010, in the Department of Physics, Imperial College London, under the supervision of Adrian Sutton and Matthew Foulkes.

He is a physicist by training and a materials scientist by inclination. He is 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, whose effects propagate upwards through the complex hierarchical structure of the material. For example, the useful lifetime of a component in a fusion reactor depends ultimately on the way fast neutrons from the fusion reaction rearrange the atoms in the crystal structure. By understanding the behaviour of atoms via simulations, his group can help to steer the development of improved materials, better suited to meet the challenges faced by society.