Dr Andrew Goodwin

College Lecturer in Chemistry

Dr Andrew Goodwin MA, BSc (Syd), PhD (Syd), PhD (Cantab). University Lecturer in Chemistry, College Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry

Departmental web page: http://goodwin.chem.ox.ac.uk/goodwin/ALG.html

Born and raised in Australia, Andrew read Chemistry and Pure Mathematics at the University of Sydney, graduating in 2002. He moved to Cambridge as a graduate student later that year, but before doing so he undertook a research project at Sydney with Professor Cameron Kepert in the area of negative thermal expansion materials. At Cambridge, he was a PhD student in the Mineral Physics group of the Department of Earth Sciences, working under the supervision of Professor Martin Dove on the problem of extracting dynamical information from neutron total scattering data. In October 2004, Andrew was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship in Materials Science at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2007 he intermitted his JRF to take up a Visiting Fellowship in Chemistry at the Australian National University, where he worked with Professor Ray Withers on the analysis of diffuse scattering patterns in electron diffraction patterns. Andrew was awarded an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship in 2008, and in 2009 was appointed to a University Lectureship in Inorganic Chemistry at Oxford.
Andrew's primary research interest is in characterising and understanding the behaviour of functional materials on the atomic scale – particularly systems that show structural disorder and/or low-energy dynamics. Many fundamentally-important materials exhibit disorder, and more often than not this disorder is implicated in their functionality: high-temperature superconductors, negative thermal expansion materials, frustrated magnets are just some examples. Consequently, the development of protocols for characterising local structure in materials and determining local structure/property relationships is one of the key challenges in the physical sciences.