The Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England was founded in the 1950s as the Department of Metallurgy, by William Hume-Rothery, who was a reader in Oxford's Department of Inorganic Chemistry.
The Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy was set up in the late 1950s and remains one of the most important professorships in British materials science. Sir Peter Hirsch formerly held the chair. The current holder of the chair is David Pettifor CBE.
Other posts in the Department include the Professor in the Physical Examination of Materials, the Cookson Professor of Materials Processing, and the Professor of Nanomaterials. The current holders of these chairs are David Cockayne, Patrick Grant and Andrew Briggs respectively.
Oxford Materials is a research department, achieving 6* status in a research assessment exercise. Research is done in the fields of electron microscopy, materials modelling, biomaterials, semiconductors, superconductors, materials processing, magnetic materials, and strong solids.
The Department offers undergraduate degrees in Materials Science and Materials, Economics and Management, having almost one hundred undergraduates, and also several dozen postgraduate students[1].
The Department of Materials shares buildings with the Department of Engineering Science on a triangular plot with Banbury Road to the west and Parks Road to the east.