As Founding Director of the NFI Bill provides strategic direction and links to national and international programmes and people. He Chairs the NFI Management Board and attends the Monthly Administrative Meetings. Bill provides oversight of all NFI governance including safety and risk assessments, and links where needed to the Head of School and Vice Chancellor. He does informal annual appraisals for the academic staff and meets informally with NFI PhDs and PDRAs.

Bill has a BSc in Metallurgy from Aston Uni, DPhil from Oxford, spent 6 years in Ohio USA as a Post Doc and Assistant Prof, and the rest of his academic career at Sheffield Uni, Imperial College and Bangor. He is a ceramic engineer, has supervised 67 students to their PhDs, published over 450 papers and 5 books including An Introduction to Nuclear Waste Immobilisation (Elsevier, 3rd edition 2019) with h index of 57 (Web of Science) and 67 (Google Scholar including books, cited over 20,000 times), and has run 4 marathons.

He was a member of the UK’s Nuclear Innovation and Research Advisory Board (NIRAB) from 2014-16 and Deputy Chair of the Government advisory Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) from 2007-2013. He served on a US National Academies Committee assessing the DOE Defense Environmental Cleanup Program (2017-19) which reported to Congress Feb 2019 and was President of the American Ceramic Society in 2017. Bill builds teams in academia including setting up the Immobilisation Science Laboratory at Sheffield, the Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics at Imperial and the NFI. In his spare time he loves building projects around the house and garden (proper engineering). If he hadn’t been so keen at schoolwork he would have become a professional footballer and played for Pompey (and England) like one of his schoolmates (except he played for Southampton!).