Anthony K. Cheetham

Tony Cheetham is currently the Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge (UK). He studied chemistry at Oxford (UK) and obtained his Ph.D. there in 1972 under the guidance of Sir Brian Fender. After doing post-doctoral work on neutron scattering in the Materials Physics Division at Harwell (UK), Cheetham joined the chemistry faculty at Oxford in 1974.
During his 17 years on the faculty at Oxford, the main focus of his work was on the development of new tools for the structural characterization of inorganic materials. These included the determination of crystalline structures from powder diffraction data.In 1991 Cheetham moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB, CA, USA) to become Professor in the Materials Department. He also took up the Directorship of the new Materials Research Laboratory, which he led for the first 12 years of its existence, and he was the Director of the International Center for Materials Research at UCSB (2004 –2007). During the 16 years at UCSB, his research was mainly in the field of nanoporous solids, including zeolites, phosphates, and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).Cheetham returned to the UK in 2007 to become the Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science at Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of Trinity College.
The main thrust of his work is now in the area of dense metal-organic framework materials, in particular the study of their magnetic, optical and electronic properties. Recent highlights include the discovery of multiferroic hybrid frameworks and detailed studies of the amorphisation of MOFs.