Lectures and Seminars
Degree-course lecture lists are published termly under Teaching section of this website.
Materials Colloquia
Research seminar series organised by the Department of Materials.
Timing: Thursdays 4pm Hume-Rothery Lecture Theatre.
Contact: email communications@materials.ox.ac.uk if you cannot attend in-person (occasionally speakers permit a live-stream).
Dates: the dates of the confirmed colloquia for 2026 - 2027 are:
Michaelmas Term 2026:
Special colloquium: (28 September 2026): Professor Rodney Ruoff (IBM, CMCM): '(i) Metacognition and me, (ii) Studies of C, B&N, dissolved in metal flux (and why), and (iii) Tensile loading macroscale single crystal graphene'.
Week 3 (29 October 2026) Professor Yu Katayama (Osaka).
Week 4 (5 November 2026) Dr Orion Farr (Oxford Chemistry).
Week 6 (19 November 2026) Reserved: details to be provided nearer the time.
Week 8 (3 December 2026) Prof Mark E Smith (Pro VC Oxford, and Oxford Materials).
Hilary Term 2027:
Week 1 (21 January 2027) Professor Rosa Espinosa-Marzal (UUC).
Week 3 (4 February 2027) Professor Rik Drummond-Brydson (Leeds). To be confirmed.
Week 5 (18 February 2027) Vacant.
Week 8 (11 March 2027) Vacant.
Trinity Term 2027:
In addition there are numerous seminars by visiting researchers advertised via email.
Flagship Biennual Lectures
Hume-Rothery Lecture 2025
Title: 'Energy ... Materials ... Microscopy: enabling and advancing our understanding of materials performance in challenging environments'
Laboratory Fellow, Idaho National Laboratory
(This lecture was held on 17 March 2025, and formed part of the celebrations in honour of the 100th Birthday of Professor Sir Peter Hirsch FRS).
Hirsch Lecture 2024
Title: 'Neofossils: bio-based plastics to sequester CO2' .
Professor of Physical Chemistry, University of Sheffield
This lecture was held on Friday 12 January 2024.
Hume-Rothery Lecture 2023
Title: 'Multicomponent High-Entropy Cantor Alloys'.
Professor Brian Cantor.
Oxford University and the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology (BCAST) Brunel University,
This lecture was held on Friday 21 April 2023.
Hirsch Lecture 2022
Title: 'From Batteries to Solar Cells: Exploring Energy Materials on the Atomic Scale' .
Professor Saiful Islam FRSC FIMMM.
Chair of Materials Modelling, University of Oxford
This lecture was held on Friday 14 January 2022.
Panopto recording (requires an Oxford account log-on) https://ox.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=c93a81b8-bda8-4d74-8919-ae1500d17ed6.
Hume-Rothery Lecture 2021
Title: 'Microscopy and Magnetic Materials: Exploring Energy Landscapes at the Nanoscale'
Professor Amanda Petford-Long FREng.
Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University.
This lecture was held on Friday 15 January 2021.
Hirsch Lecture 2019
Title: Triboreacted materials as functional interfaces in internal combustion engines and medical implants
Professor Anne Neville OBE, FREng, FRS, FRSE
RAEng Chair in Emerging Technologies, and Professor of Tribology and Surface Engineering, University of Leeds
This lecture was held on Friday 8 February 2019.
Hume-Rothery Lecture 2018
Title: Damage-tolerance in engineering and biological materials
Professor Robert O. Richie FREng, ForMemRS.
Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Departments of Materials Science & Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, University of California Berkeley.
This lecture was held on Wednesday 24th January 2018.
Other Seminar Series in Oxford
Additional seminar series of interest organised elsewhere in the university include:
