Paul McMillan

Paul F. McMillan is Sir William Ramsay Professor of Chemistry at University College London. He graduated with a B.Sc. in Chemistry from Edinburgh University in 1977 and obtained his Ph.D. degree at Arizona State University (1981). He remained at ASU becoming full Professor in 1992, and Director of the Centre for Solid State Science in 1997. In 2000 he moved to London to occupy a new Chair in Solid State Chemistry at UCL and the Royal Institution, before becoming Ramsay chair at UCL in 2008. In London, he established laboratories for solid state chemistry and materials research under high pressure-high temperature conditions, along with work on nanomaterials and amorphous materials including the unusual phenomena of density-driven liquid-liquid phase transitions and polyamorphism. Now his interests in high pressure science and spectroscopy are extending into biophysics and biology. He received a Wolfson-Royal Society Research Merit Award (2001-2006) and an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship (2006-2011). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and received the RSC award for Solid State Chemistry in 2003, and the Peter Day award in 2011.

A passionate educator, he won the Rensselaer School of Engineering Innovation in Teaching Award in 2012. He provides consultancy, and serves on the Advisory Board of Chemical Engineering Science, and the Editorial Boards of Powder Technology, Diffusion Fundamentals and the new EMS Journal of Fractal Geometry. He also serves on the Advisory Boards of the Chemical Engineering Department at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, and has served as vice-Chair of the AIChE’s International Committee.