Dr Nicole Church appointed the Beatrice Mary Dale Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge

We extend our congratulations to Dr Nicole Church, who has been elected the Beatrice Mary Dale Research Fellow at Newnham College. Nicole is excited to continue her research within the Department, as well as with her international collaborators and industrial contacts. Nicole has a particular research focus on exploiting the reversible shape-memory and superelastic behaviour exhibited by certain classes of titanium alloys, with potential applications in the biomedical and engineering sectors. These alloys can sustain large, recoverable elastic strains, but suffer from a form of functional fatigue whereby the useful properties diminish with repeated mechanical cycling. She aims to develop novel high resolution characterisation techniques to probe the mechanisms by which this functional fatigue accumulates, which should facilitate both compositional and thermo-mechanical processing optimisation to design new alloys that do not suffer from this in-service property degradation.