Professor Donal Bradley FRS, Deputy Principal of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, has accepted appointment as Pro Rector (Research), with effect from 1 October 2011. He will take over from the Acting Pro Rector (Research), Professor David Begg who continues as Principal of Imperial College Business School.
Professor Bradley will be responsible for strategic research issues across the College, determining priorities for strategic research investment and coordinating and developing the College’s research relationships externally. He will be a member of the Management Board and will report to the Rector. The position is part-time and Professor Bradley will retain his research activities within the Centre for Plastic Electronics and the Department of Physics.
Professor Bradley is one of the most highly cited scientists in the fields of physics and materials science, and is a co-inventor of conjugated polymer electroluminescence, an innovation that launched the field of plastic electronics. He graduated from Imperial with a first class BSc and ARCS in Physics in 1983 and returned to the College in 2000 as Professor of Experimental Solid State Physics after extended periods at Cambridge and Sheffield Universities.
He became the Lee-Lucas Professor of Experimental Physics in 2006, was Head of the Department of Physics from 2005 to 2009, and has been Deputy Principal of the Faculty of Natural Sciences since 2009. In 2009 he was named the first Director of the Centre for Plastic Electronics. He is a co-founder of Cambridge Display Technology Ltd and a co-founder and Director of Molecular Vision Ltd, an Imperial spin-out company. He is also a Director of the Solar Press (UK) Ltd.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2005, and was awarded a CBE in the 2010 New Years Honours for services to science.
Professor Bradley’s successor as Deputy Principal of the Faculty of Natural Sciences will be announced in due course.
Rodney Eastwood
College Secretary