Dr Chris Race

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow and lead the Atomistic Simulation of Materials group within the School of Materials at the University of Manchester. We use the tools of atomistic simulation to investigate the behaviour of a variety of materials and material evolution processes.

I joined the University of Manchester in April 2013 as a Dalton Research Fellow within the Dalton Nuclear Institute and the Department of Materials. Before coming to Manchester I 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. I completed my 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.