The Team

Professor Fan is the founder and current Director of BCAST at Brunel University London. He is the principal investigator/director of the EPSRC Future LiME Research Hub, a national centre of excellence in liquid metal engineering. He is also the principle investigator for the recently successful UKRI Interdisciplinary Centre for CircularMetal. He obtained his first degree in Metallurgy from University of Science and Technology, Beijing in 1982 and his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Surrey University in the UK in 1993. He has published over 400 scientific papers with an H-Index of 55 and a total currently of 11289 citations. Fan has initiated, managed and delivered research projects funded from a wide range of grant sources as principal investigator, including 13 EPSRC grants, 4 HEFCE grants, 6 DTI/TSB/IUK grants, 3 EU grants and a number of industrial contracts, with grants totalling over £70M. He has been chairman of 4 major international conferences and members international scientific committee of 6 international conferences. He is the co-chairmen of the Casting and Solidification Society (IOM3), Board Member of the Light Metals Division (IOM3), a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) and the Institute of Cast Metal Engineers (ICME) as well as a member of the American Society of Materials (ASM) and the EPSRC Metals College. He was the recipient of the Elegant Work Prize (1995), the Cook/Ablett Award (2003) and Dowding Medal and Prize (2012) of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). Fan’s research has been focused on (1) Understanding of early stages of solidification covering Prenucleation, Heterogeneous Nucleation, Grain initiation and Grain refinement and (2) developing innovative techniques for melt treatment and metal casting.

Brian Cantor is Professor of Materials at Oxford and Brunel Universities.

He is also Founding Chair of the World Technology Universities Network, a Trustee of the Science Museums Group and an Editor of Elsevier’s premier review journal, Progress in Materials Science. He has published over 300 books and papers.

He invented the field of High Entropy Alloys and discovered “Cantor alloys”. In the recent past, he has been Vice-Chancellor of the Universities of Bradford and York, Head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Oxford, a research scientist at GE Labs in the USA, a consultant for Alcan, NASA and Rolls-Royce, and a Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

He has worked at other universities such as Sussex, Northeastern, Banaras, Washington State and IISc Bangalore, and chaired or been on boards such as the Marshall Aid Commission, the UK Universities Pensions Forum, and Bradford, Leeds and York Local Economic Partnerships (LEPs).

He founded and built up the Begbroke Science Park, the Heslington East Campus, the Hull-York Medical School, the National Science Learning Centre, and the World Technology Universities Network. He has received academic prizes, honorary professorships and fellowships in the UK, USA, China and India. He was awarded a CBE for services to higher education in 2013.

Geoff Scamans, is a Professor of Metallurgy at Brunel University and the Chief Scientific Officer of Innoval Technology Limited. He obtained his first degree (1970) and his PhD (1974) in Metallurgy from Imperial College. He worked for Alcan in their Banbury research laboratory from 1970 to 2003 and from then at Innoval Technology and Brunel University.

Jan Godsell is Dean of the School of Business and Economics and Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Strategy at Loughborough University. Her work focuses on the pursuit of more responsible consumption and production through the alignment of product, marketing and supply chain strategy with consumer needs. In particular Jan’s work focuses on the design of end-to-end supply chains to enable, responsibility, sustainability, resilience and productivity. As a chartered engineer, Jan has more than three decades of combined industry experience in product development, innovation, supply chain strategy, and process improvement working for ICI, Astra Zeneca and Dyson. She has advised government and industry on supply chain strategy and its relationship to industrial and business strategy. Jan is currently a member of the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) supply chain resilience advisory group. Jan is also a member of the advisory group for the Made Smarter Innovation (MSI) challenge, the MSI Digital Supply Chain Hub and the UK Manufacturing Forum. Jan is also a co-chair of the Regional Productivity Forum for the Midlands, part of the Productivity Institute.

Claire Davis is the Royal Academy of Engineering / Tata Steel Professor of Low Energy Steel Processing and she leads the Advanced Steel Research Centre (ASRC) at WMG, University of Warwick. The ASRC  comprises over forty people carrying on research on steel where the focus is to develop new and improved steels and understand new processing technologies.

The work tackles both fundamental and applied research from steelmaking through to production.  Claire’s personal research interests are on the development of microstructure during processing and the relationships between microstructure and properties (both physical and mechanical) in steels. She also works on the non-destructive evaluation of steel microstructure using electromagnetic sensors.

Mark Miodownik is the UCL Professor of Materials & Society.  He received his Ph.D in turbine jet engine alloys from Oxford University, and has worked as a materials engineer in the USA, Ireland and the UK.

For more than twenty years he has championed materials science research that links to the arts and humanities, medicine, and society. This culminated in the establishment of the UCL Institute of Making, where he is a director and runs the research programme.

Mark also recently set up the Plastic Waste Innovation Hub to carry our research into solving the environmental catastrophe of plastic waste. Mark is the multi-award winning author of New York Times bestselling book Stuff Matters. He regularly presents BBC TV and radio programmes on materials science and engineering.  In 2014 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2018 he was awarded an MBE for services to materials science, engineering and broadcasting.

Alvaro Calzadilla specializes in macro-economic modelling. He has worked extensively with global computable general equilibrium (CGE) models applied to the analysis of water resources, agricultural policies, land use and bioenergy policies, renewable energy, and climate change.

His PhD in Economics from Hamburg University and the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modelling (Germany) focused on the modelling of water resources under a global CGE framework. He developed a new version of the GTAP-W model which includes water as a factor of production in agriculture, differentiates between rainfed and irrigated crops and allows for substitution between water and other primary factors.

As a postdoc researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Alvaro co-developed a global CGE model with a great detail on land use competition and biofuel production (DART-BIO). This model is used to evaluate different agricultural and energy policies. He has also developed special versions of the DART model to analyse the economic impacts of land-grab issues in Africa, extraction of oil and gas from the Arctic, and the Desertec initiative.

As part of the UCL ISR modelling team, which he joined in July 2015 as a Senior Lecturer in Macro-economic Modelling for a Green Economy, Alvaro contributes to the development of a state-of-the-art global CGE model to analyse the water-land-energy nexus. This global CGE model is complemented by a detailed UK CGE model to analyse possible transitions to a low carbon energy system and resource efficiency at the country (UK), regional and global level.