Del Atkinson

Background

About Del Atkinson

I concluded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship in 2022 and I recently finished 5 years as Head of Condensed Matter Physics in Durham. I was appointed the inaugural Sir Gareth Roberts Professor of Applied Physics at Durham University in April 2017 and I am a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. My research experience in academia and industry extends over three decades and involves work on magnetic materials, thin-film semiconductors for flexible electronics and nanocomposite pressure-sensitive inks for sensing applications. My work includes industrial collaborations involving functional materials. I have published over 100 research papers including works in Nature, Science, Nature Materials, Physical Review Letters and Applied Physics Letters and I have had four granted patents. My primary work is in magnetism where the focus is on understanding the relationship between physical structure, fundamental magnetic material properties and the magnetization reversal behaviour of nanoscale magnetic structures and this currently includes work on flexible spintronics, spin-orbit torques and microwave properties of magnetic materials. I have previously held a UK EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship in Nanoscale Magnetism and Spintronics from 2004 to 2009, an RCUK Fellowship in Nanoscience from 2006 to 2011 and in 2008 I was a visiting research fellow at CSIC in Madrid, Spain. I have been a principal investigator and co-investigator on a number of research projects funded by the UK EPSRC, Royal Society, KTP, the EU and other sources. I served four years as an elected member of the UK Institute of Physics (IOP) magnetism group committee and served on the UK Magnetics Society management committee. In September 2011 I chaired the annual IOP Current Research in Magnetism Workshop and in 2015 I chaired a UK-India Workshop on Magnetisation Processes. To date I have supervised 18 postgraduate research students to successful completion. In I was awarded a prestigious BAE Systems Chair’s Gold Award for Innovation.