Every day we come into contact with hundreds if not thousands of manufactured objects. And all of them are made from something, one material or another.

Materials Science is basically the study of the structure of those materials and their properties and how they behave. And once we understand that we can understand how we can turn those materials into useful products.

You can see it actually happening, the results of it happening in the world.

It takes in aspects of Chemistry and Physics.

Everywhere you look you can see different materials, and once you study you kind of see why things are built the way they are.

Everything’s made of material and as you like walk around I know it’s a bit geeky but you can like look at stuff and go ‘I know how that’s made‘.

The thing that interests me most is understanding how we can change the properties of materials to turn them into things of use to us.

Anything you buy, anything that’s made is made in a particular way for a particular reason. Materials affect everything.

It’s almost impossible to answer because nothing that you see around you or use on a daily basis would exist.

Well every aspect of our lives is touched by advances in technology. And in many cases those advances have been based on developments in Materials Science.

Mostly you wouldn’t be flying in aeroplanes and you wouldn’t be using that video camera and we wouldn’t be watching television. If you really think about it just about everything we do relies on Materials Scientists.

In the past if you studied Materials Science at University you would have spent lot of time in lectures. Teaching of Materials Science is changing. Materials Science students do a lot more practical project work. And they need to have a lot of practical skills.

Group work and learning those employability type of skills – Materials Science is ideal for that because it lends itself very well to sort of case study work

The career prospects after you graduate are one of the best, you can go into all sort of things.

Do research, get your hands messy, do something really practical. I mean you can use materials analytical skills in other jobs as well.

Working in Materials Science as with all other Engineering subjects gives you the opportunity to travel all over the world and work with different people from different countries.

Not many people have heard or know the importance of materials and obviously it is used worldwide and everywhere.

Last year I went to Switzerland for eight weeks that was fantastic.

Certainly as a postgraduate student doing Materials Science you spent a week away somewhere in the world every two or three months.

After completing my PhD I carried on and did a little bit more research at the University and then I went to work in industry for three years where I worked for an industrial research organisation. But the most exciting part of the work is developing new technologies and new processes.

When you’ve done some research and you piece together an explanation for something that you’ve been looking for and you get that eureka moment where it all fits together. You understand that and it’s like you know a little bit more about the world.