Professor Ian M Hutchings
graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1971 and was awarded his PhD from Cambridge in 1975 for work on the erosion of ductile metals by solid particle impact. He was a member of the academic staff in Materials and Metallurgy for a period of 24 years, from 1977-2001. He currently holds the GKN Chair in the Manufacturing Division of the Department of Engineering. His research interests over a 30 year period have been in the tribological behaviour of materials and include all types of wear, and in particular the relationship between materials microstructure and wear rates and mechanisms. He has now moved on to study the tribology of materials in manufacturing environments. He is the author of Tribology: Friction and Wear of Engineering Materials (1992) and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.