Jon BinnerJon Binner is Professor of Ceramic Materials and Head of the Materials Department at Loughborough University. He is also a Visiting Professor at both Beijing University of Chemical Technology and Kunming University in China. He obtained his Bachelors and PhD from the Ceramics Department at Leeds University and has since worked as an academic at the Universities of California at Los Angeles, Leeds, Nottingham and Brunel; he was also Head of Department at the latter.

The focus of his research is the generation of both the necessary scientific understanding and the required engineering solutions for the development of processing routes for ceramic materials that display technical and/or financial advantages over existing processes and which yield new or improved materials. Due to the complexity of the work and the requirements of industry, a multidisciplinary approach is often adopted. Within the field of ceramic processing, his work has mainly focused on colloidal processing, where the aim is to understand and hence control the rheology of ceramic suspensions, and microwave processing, where the aim is to generate a detailed understanding of the interaction between microwaves and advanced non-metallic materials and then to use this to develop improved process routes. Over the past few years, the work has increasingly focused on producing nanostructured ceramics from a ‘top-down’ approach. The work has already led to the ability to produce a range of fully dense ceramic components with uniform nanostructures with average grain sizes of <100 nm. Some very interesting properties have been identified, including monolithic toughness values of around 14 – 15 MPa m½  and a zirconia ceramic that is completely resistant to attack by moisture even after 2 weeks at 245oC (conventional zirconia disintegrates after just 1 hour). He is also working on metal-ceramic interpenetrating composites (where both phases are fully three dimensionally connected), and novel materials for both armour and ultra high temperature applications.

Jon Binner has published nearly 170 research papers, as well as editing or contributing to 19 books, given 33 keynote, plenary and invited talks at international conferences and holds six patents with two more recently submitted. He has won 101 research grants totalling in excess of £7.4M, many have been international in nature, mainly from within the European Union. 23 PhD and 2 MPhil students have been supervised to successful completion; 6 more PhD students are currently being supervised, with 2 in different states of the writing up process. 2 new PhD students will join his group in autumn 2009. A total of 21 Postdoctoral research projects have been supervised with 2 more currently ongoing.

Jon Binner is a Fellow of both the Institute of Materials, Mining and Minerals (IOM3), for which he Chairs the Ceramic Science Committee and is Vice Chair of the Ceramic Society, and the Institute of Nanotechnology and a member of both the American and European Ceramic Societies. He is a Council Member for both the IOM3 and the ECerS. He is also a member of the EPSRC College. He received the Institute’s Holliday Prize in 1995 and the Ivor Jenkins Medal in 2007.