Dr Kathy Christofidou

Kathy (Katerina) Christofidou joined the department in 2019, and is now a Senior Lecturer in Metallurgy. She is currently the departmental UCAS admissions tutor and leads the "Materials Discovery and Prototyping" technology platform for the Royce Institute.

Prior to this, she held roles at the University of Cambridge, as part of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre, and the University of Manchester, where she also worked in close collaboration with the Henry Royce Institute.

She holds a PhD in Metallurgy from the University of Cambridge and an MEng in Aerospace Materials Engineering from Imperial College London.

Kathy's research focuses on bridging high performance alloy design and advanced manufacturing following two key strands; a) accelerated. digitalised methods of alloy development with emphasis on manufacturing performance and b) advanced diffraction methods for non-destructive alloy evaluation applied to high performance components.

As part of her collaboration with Rolls-Royce PLC, she has developed new polycrystalline Ni-based superalloys for turbine disc applications, as well as exploring strategies for the design of high-temperature materials amenable to laser-based additive layer manufacturing. Her work in this area was recognised with the 2022 IOM3 Grünfeld Award and Medal highlighting her contributions and impact to industry.

In addition, a major area of her research interests is that of high entropy alloys and the possibilities that these materials offer for expanding our understanding of physical metallurgy beyond a single base element and the associated thermodynamic principles governing this behaviour.