Professor P J Durham

Professor P J Durham, Director Computational Science and Engineering
Paul Durham joined Daresbury Laboratory in 1979, working on the theory of the structure and spectroscopy of electronic states in solids, crystalline, disordered and magnetic. He was a co-author, with Neville Greaves, Greg Diakun and John Pendry, of the first paper produced by the SRS, and has published many papers on the theory and applications of x-ray absorption spectroscopy, especially in the near-edge region. With John Pendry and Chris Hodges, he applied multiple scattering theory to x-ray spectroscopy, using it to describe not only first order (absorption and emission) but second order processes (fluorescence, anomalous scattering and resonant Raman scattering). In 1989 he became Head of the Theory and Computational Science Division at Daresbury, since 1999 has been Director of CCLRC’s Computational Science and Engineering Department, and in April 2001 became the first head of CCLRC’s e-Science Centre, a post he held for two years. He has been an Honorary Research Fellow at Birmingham University and is a Visiting Professor at Liverpool University. He has been a member of EPSRC’s Physics College and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.