Prof Paul Midgley

Professor Paul Midgley FRS is Professor of Materials Science and, from October 2018 to September 2020, he was Head of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy in the University of Cambridge. From 1997 to 2018 he was Director of the Department's Electron Microscope Facility. He studied Physics at the H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory at the University of Bristol, receiving his PhD in 1991 for electron microscopy studies of high Tc superconductors. He held two Research Fellowships at Bristol, the first funded by The Royal Commission for The Exhibition of 1851, the second by The Royal Society. He moved to Cambridge in 1997 as an Assistant Director of Research, then promoted to University Lecturer, University Senior Lecturer, Reader and to Professor of Materials Science in 2008. He is also a Professorial Fellow at Peterhouse. 

His interests lie primarily in transmission electron microscopy and in recent years has focussed on the development of electron tomography, precession electron diffraction and energy loss spectroscopy and their application to nanoscale materials. Recently he has developed compressed sensing and machine learning algorithms tailored to the analysis of large multi-dimensional electron microscopy data sets.

He sits on the Editorial Boards of a number of journals and was for many years Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ultramicroscopy. He has received a number of awards and prizes including, in 2004, the Institute of Materials Rosenhain Medal and, in 2007, the Ernst-Ruska Prize of the German Microscopy Society. From 2008-2012, he was President of the European Microscopy Society and, from 2012-2016, the Past-President. In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and, in 2016, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.