Personal statement

My research interests are focused on maps for the interactions of solid particle erosion and wear of materials in corrosive environments, with specific emphasis on charting mechanisms of materials loss. My research group has pioneered a number of maps in the Tribo-Corrosion domain including the erosion-corrosion and micro-abrasion maps for aqueous environments applicable to renewable energy (wind and tidal energy), oil exploration and bio-medical conditions (hip joint replacements and dental implants).  We are also developing paradigms for combining materials and meteorological maps. 

The Tribology Research Group in the Department which I lead has attracted over £2m of research funding since 2016.  I am a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (CPhys, FInsP) UK, of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland (CEng, FIEI) and a member of the Federation of European Engineers (Eur Ing). I have a BE (1984) from the University of Galway Ireland and an MSc (1986), PhD (1990) and DSc (2003) from the University of Manchester UK.  I am also a member of the EPSRC peer review college in the UK. 

I have led the EPSRC funded ReC-ASM (£1.1m) project which aims to optimize materials in marine and tidal energy conversion and have supervised over 30 PhD students.  Many of our current projects sit in the Green Tribology and low carbon technology space.

My group has authored 220 publications (over 160 journal articles) and has an h-index of 41 Scopus and 49 Google scholar (approximately 7000 citations) with an i10-index of 124. Our Research Interest Score of 2720 in ResearchGate currently exceeds that of 98% of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics researchers worldwide and 97% of ResearchGate members. It is comprised of over 85% citations in academic journals.  In the 2020 Stanford study of top 2% academics internationally, we were within the top 1% in the Mechanical Engineering and Transports ranking. 

I was awarded on behalf of our group TopScholar by ScholarGPS in June 2025 for "quality of scholarly contributions in the top 0.5% worldwide of all scholars" up to the 2024 period.

In December 2023, the IMechE UK honoured our group activities in Strathclyde with the Donald Julius Groen award in recognition of our research achievements.

I lead the International Tribo-Corrosion Network and sit on several editorial boards including Lubricants.  Our collaborations on materials for energy have included the EPSRC CAMREG project with the University of Edinburgh and the EU SPIRE 2 project on novel approaches towards energy storage with University of Ulster. 

Our group has founded the first journal in Tribo-Corrosion of which I am Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Bio- and Tribo-Corrosion (Springer, New York) which published 116 papers in 2024 (CiteScore for 2024 of 6.8)  and is Q1 in four categories i.e. Mechanical Engineering (81st percentile), Mechanics of Materials, Materials Science miscellaneous and Metals & Alloys with over 124,000 downloads recorded for 2024.

Research findings in our group have been presented in keynote and plenary lectures at over 70 national and international conferences.