Abstract
Prof Roger Whatmore CEO, Tyndall National Institute
Roger Whatmore graduated with his PhD from Cambridge University in 1977 and spent eighteen years working with the GEC Marconi (formerly Plessey) research laboratories at Caswell in the UK on the development and exploitation of ferroelectric materials in a wide range of electronic devices, particularly pyroelectric infra red materials and detectors, and piezoelectric sensors and actuators. He was awarded GEC’s Nelson Gold Medal for this work in 1993. He also led the team which won the Prince of Wales’ Award for Innovation in that year. In October 1994 he took the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Engineering Nanotechnology at Cranfield University, where he built a team researching the use of ferroelectrics in microsystems and nanotechnology, and was appointed as Head of the Department of Advanced Materials. During this time he helped form the company IRISYS Ltd, which works in the field of commercial infra-red sensing and imaging. He served as non-executive director of this company from 1996 to 2006. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. In 2003 the IoM3 awarded him the Griffith Medal and Prize for distinguished work in materials science. He has published over 250 papers (h-index=31) and 40 patents in the field of ferroelectric materials and their applications. In Jan 2006, he took the position of CEO of Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland.
