Professor Bill Lee to become an Emeritus Professor

Professor Bill Lee to step down from his academic post at the end of June.

To recognise and celebrate the many achievements of Professor Bill Lee, we have collated a number of highlights from his 14 years in the Department. 

Head of Department

Professor Lee joined Materials as Head of Department in January 2006. He is credited by many of his colleagues for regenerating the Department and creating new opportunities for materials both within and outside of College. He steered the strategic expansion in both research and education – focusing on bringing in truly excellent staff.

When Professor Lee was appointed Head of Department, Materials had been gradually shrinking, along with the rest of the discipline in the UK, for 20 years. The Department itself had approximately 16 staff.

Together with the Faculty Principal at the time, Professor Dame Julia King, he managed to create a space for the department to grow and increase finances. This included founding two new groupings; the ceramics theme (in collaboration with Mechanical Engineering) and the Thomas Young Centre theme (in collaboration with Physics). This was achieved with new money, which together with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), reinvigorated grant funding, the growth in UG student numbers and a new MSc, formed the growth path for a decade to double in size and achieve sustainability. 

Professor Lee was Head of the Department until September 2010.  

Awards and Achievements 

Professor Lee's is an expert in ceramics and glass. His research focuses on the relation between processing, properties and microstructures in a broad range of ceramics. 

He has won multiple awards while working in the Department. Most notably in 2012, Professor Lee was elected a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Professor Lee was also the first non-US President of the American Ceramics Society in it's 118 year history and the Imperial lead for Distinctive. 

He was awarded the Kingery Award of the American Ceramic Society in 2012 and the Lee Hsun Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014. Professor Lee was also the  Director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering until 2016 and Deputy Chair for the Government Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM). 

Before joining Imperial Professor Lee was also awarded prizes including the Rosenhain Medal (1999), Pfeil Award (2000) of the IOMMM, the Wakabayashi Prize (2004) of the Refractories Society of Japan.

In total, Professor Lee has published over 450 peer-reviewed papers and has been awarded research grants totalling over £60M, including £5.5M from EPSRC to set up the Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics (CASC) and over £2M as co-investigator with Mike Finnis on the programme grant Materials in Extreme Environments (XMat) with Jon Binner at Loughborough. 

He has also supervised 59 students to completion of their PhDs. 

Outside Imperial 

In 2007, Professor Lee completed the London Marathon with his brother Bob in an impressive 4 hours 49 minutes! Together they raised just under 5k for Kidney Research UK. 

Bill is also a keen Portsmouth football fan and many staff members have spoken about his love for football. In 2015 he appeared as an expert on ceramics on BBC2’s The Great Pottery Throwdown.

 The future

The Department would like to thank Professor Bill Lee for his invaluable contributions and wish him all the best for the future.