Paul Attfield

(John) Paul Attfield (born 1962) FRS is a Professor of Materials Science in the School of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions (CSEC).

Attfield was educated at the University of Oxford where he was a member of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry followed by a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1987 for his work on chemical crystallography supervised by Anthony Cheetham and Peter Battle.

Following his DPhil, Attfield was a Lecturer, and later a Reader at the University of Cambridge from 1991 to 2003. Attfield's research focuses on synthesis, structural studies, and property measurements for electronic materials such as transition metal oxides. His research has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). He has also made significant contributions to the study of the Verwey transition in magnetite, solving its charge ordering properties and has supervised numerous PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in his laboratory.

Awards and honours

Attfield won the Meldola Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1991; the Corday-Morgan Medal of the RSC in 1998; and the Peter Day Award in 2013. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His nomination reads: