The School of Engineering and Materials has made three new staff appointments to enhance the materials research activities. Cees Bastiaansen will join us in October as a Professor from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Cees started his career at DSM in The Netherlands where he was a project leader in applied polymer research. Since 1995 he has been working at Eindhoven University of Technology as an associate professor, first on a part-time basis together with a position at the ETH-Zürich in Switzerland, and for the last couple of years on a full-time basis at Eindhoven. His research has focused on the optical and the electro-optical properties of polymer systems used for data storage and the telecommunications industry.

Martin Heeney, who is joining us in October is currently a Project leader of the Organic Semiconductor Group at Merck Chemicals Ltd. in Southampton. Martin's principal research focus is on the synthesis of materials for use in plastic electronics such as organic field effect transistors, light-emitting and photovoltaic materials. Martin joins us as a senior lecturer.

Jeremy Sloan will join us in December. He is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow working at Surrey University where he has been since 2006. Before that he was a Research Fellow at Oxford University. His research interests are in solid state chemistry, carbon and non-carbon fullerene-like materials and advanced electron microscopy techniques.

These three appointments mark a clear strengthening in the area of functional polymeric materials, which has been an area of considerable growth over the last few years.