ProfessorCatherine Bishop

Catherine Bishop is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering and an Associate Investigator of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. Her research is funded by government and industry. She has led both Marsden- and MBIE-funded research projects in New Zealand.

Professor Bishop is a materials scientist who collaborates internationally and across many areas of materials science and engineering research. Key current international partners are at Purdue and MIT. Her transdisciplinary collaborators includes chemical engineers, physicists, chemists and microbiologists. Her research bridges structure-property-processing-performance interrelationships in alloys and ceramics. Her team works on molten oxide electrolysis for processing of critical metals, modelling fundamental behaviours at interfaces in oxide ferroelectrics and on high-throughput characterisation of alloys.

She obtained a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and worked for Westinghouse, Ebara Solar and Johnson Matthey as part of her co-op degree. Dr Bishop earned a PhD in Materials Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research was part of a large NSF-EU jointly funded programme (NANOAM). She moved back to the UK for an MIT postdoc on collaborative research with the Department of Materials, University of Oxford and other EU partners (INCEMS). She held a three-year Career Development Fellowship at the University of Oxford before joining UC in 2008.

She was an Academic Visitor at University of Oxford (2019) and a Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2015). Dr Bishop was New Zealand partner member of HERALD EU-COST action (2015-2018), Chair of the first annual Materials@UC conference (2018), Leader of the MaterialsCluster@UC (2019-2023) and has volunteered for MIT as an Educational Counsellor since 2015. She has convened symposia for ACerS at international conferences, including MS&T 2020-present, and is co-chair of the 2028 Solid State Studies in Ceramics Gordon Research Conference.