Materials50: Timeline

Materials at Queen Mary University of London was born from the vision of Professor Giffen (Head of Mechanical Engineering) and the initial leadership of Edgar Andrews (first Chair in Materials) in creating one of the absolute first Materials departments in the UK, back in 1967.

Embracing from the very start a host of, at the time, ‘modern’ materials including polymers, semiconductors and, later on, composites, naturally positioned Queen Mary at the forefront of international Materials research, when Metallurgy was by far the dominating discipline.

The first 50 years of Materials at Queen Mary is rich of successes like the Polymer Research Centre, the Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC) in Biomedical Materials, ApaTech Ltd. (acquired for $330m by Baxter International), Nanoforce Technology Ltd. and, recently, the NPU-QMES (Northwestern Polytechnical University Queen Mary Engineering School) International Degree Programmes.

Above all, the greatest achievement resides in having trained generations of leading materials scientists, scholars and citizens.