John Wood is currently a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, where he was previously the principal. John was previously Chief Executive of the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils (CCLRC) from 2001 to 2007 on leave from Nottingham University. He graduated from Sheffield University in 1971 in metallurgy and undertook research at Cambridge University for his PhD. He remained at Cambridge as Goldsmith’s Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College until 1978 when he took up a lectureship at the Open University. In 1989 he became Cripps Professor of Materials Engineering at Nottingham University and Head of Department and subsequently became Dean of Engineering in 1998. His research has been in the area of materials processing of non-equilibrium structures where he has over 240 publications and 14 patents. He was awarded a Doctor of Metallurgy in 1994 from Sheffield University and an honorary Doctor of Science from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania, receiving the Citizen of Honour of Cluj-Napoca for his “help in restructuring materials engineering education in Romania”. Cluj-Napoca is the capital of Transylvania!
During his research career John Wood has held a number of directorships and consultancies within industry and acted as an adviser on materials issues to governments and is a Director of M4 Technologies, The Industrial Trust and Maney Publishing. He is a trustee of the Tomorrow Project and the Daphne Jackson Trust. He was appointed Chair of the Office of Science & Technology Foresight Panel on Materials in 1997 until 2001. He is currently chair of the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures and chair of the International Steering Committee for the European X-Ray Free Electron Laser. He sits on the Board of the Joint Information Services Committee, chairing their Support for Research Committee and their Scholarly Communications Group. He is on the Advisory Board of the British Library. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and has won the Grunfeld and Ivor Jenkins’ prizes of the Institute of Materials and was awarded the prestigious “William Johnson Gold Medal” in 2001 for “a lifetime’s achievement in materials processing”. He was honoured in the 2007 Queen’s New Year list with a CBE for services to science.
