2005 ACTA MATERIALIA, INC. GOLD MEDAL
19 November 2004 - Oxford NanoScience Polaron Nanotechnology Division

Over a career spanning more than forty years, Professor Smith has made many outstanding contributions to the field of Metallurgy and Materials Sciences, as a researcher, as a teacher, and as an administrator.

In recognition of these achievements, Professor Smith was elected to the Royal
Society, the Institute of Materials, and the Institute of Physics (London, 1996), the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
(1997), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (2003).

Professor Smith was born in Aldershot, U.K. in 1943, and was educated at Salesian College, Farnborough, U.K. (1953-61) and Corpus Christi College, Oxford University (1961-68). He was one of an early generation of students of Metallurgy at Oxford, during the period when Professor William Hume-Rothery was the Head of Department. At that time, the Metallurgy degree course was just separating out from the Chemistry degree course, and the students studied the whole of the Honours Degree syllabus for Inorganic and Physical Chemistry, as well as the Science of Metals.

After graduating with first class honours in 1965, he carried out his postgraduate studies in the Chemistry Department at Oxford University, under the direction of Professor John Stuart Anderson. His project involved the use of field emission and field ion microscopy to study the epitaxial growth of crystals of nickel on tungsten, and the initial oxidation of these crystals. He was awarded his doctorate in 1968.

This initial experience set the pattern for his future career. He has maintained a lifelong interest in both Chemistry and Materials. His research has focused on the role of alloying elements and trace additions on phase transformations, phase stability and heat treatment of metals and alloys. He is principally using the techniques of field ion microscopy and atom probe microanalysis to study the solid state chemistry of these processes at the atomic level.

Professor Smith returned to the Materials Department at Oxford University in 1968, as a postdoctoral research fellow, and worked together with Dr David Smith, under the direction of Professor Sir Peter Hirsch, to establish a research group for metallurgical field ion microscopy.

During the 1970s, his research group developed one of the first computer controlled atom probe systems, and used it to study the redistribution of alloy elements during the pearlite and bainite reactions, to explore the movement of carbon atoms and alloy additions during the early stages of tempering of martensite, and to investigate the partitioning of alloy elements during the heat treatment of nickel-based superalloys. They also used pulsed laser atom probe techniques to study oxidation and metallisation processes on a range of semiconductor materials.

In the mid-1980s, Alfred Cerezo, Terence Godfrey and he developed the first
operational 3-D atom probe, which combined a field ion microscope with a timeof-
flight mass spectrometer and a single-atom sensitivity, position-sensitive detector. This enabled three-dimensional reconstruction of the atomic scale chemistry of a solid specimen to be undertaken for the first time. They also established a spin-out company (Kindbrisk Limited, later renamed Oxford nanoScience Limited, and now part of Polaron plc) to exploit this technology.

The technique is now used by research groups in Europe, North America, Asia
and Australia, and there are three commercial manufacturers of such instruments. Some hundreds of research papers have resulted, covering a wide diversity of topics, including the study of the long term structural integrity of nuclear reactor materials, precipitate nucleation and growth behaviour in ferrous and non-ferrous alloys, spinodal decomposition processes, solute segregation at dislocations and grain boundaries in alloys and intermetallics, and for the investigation of nanocrystalline materials and the nano-scale metallic multilayers used for information storage applications. Most recently, the technique has been applied by his research group to the atomic-scale study of heterogeneous catalysts, thus completing the circle of his own research interests, from materials to chemistry.

Professor Smith was promoted successively to Lecturer (1977), Reader (1992) and Professor (1996) in the Department of Materials at Oxford, and became Head of Department in 2000. He was awarded the Sir George Beilby Medal and Prize in 1985 (joint award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Society for Chemical Industry and the Institute of Metals, UK), and the Rosenhain Medal and Prize of the Institute of Materials in 1991. In 1996 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and also as a Fellow of the Institute of Materials and of the Institute of Physics. In 1997 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and in 2003, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In March 2004, he became the non-executive chairman of Polaron plc. He has served on a number of professional and public bodies, including the Council of the Royal Society, the Council of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and the U.K. Materials Foresight Panel.

He is author or co-author of two books and 280 research papers, and has given presentations about his work at more than 100 scientific conferences and 120 research laboratories around the world.

The 2005 Acta Materialia, Inc. Gold Medal will be presented to Professor Smith on 15th June 2005 at the IOM3 Banquet in London, England.

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