TCM's Sixtieth Anniversary

On 10th July 2015 TCM held an event to celebrate sixty years of continuous existence, from its birth in 1954 under John Ziman as the Solid State Theory Group, through its renaming to Theory of Condensed Matter in 1972 to be more inclusive of fields such as polymer physics. We were pleased to welcome back over seventy of our alumni.

The Group invited back six alumni to talk about their careers since leaving TCM. We chose three from academia, and three who had left academia.

The talks were:

Prof Chris Pickard (UCL, and Cottrell Professor of Materials Science (Cambridge) elect) From electrons to atoms - randomly searching for new materials

Prof Robin Ball (Warwick) Fermions as an Emergent Phenomenon

Prof Peter Littlewood (Director, Argonne National Laboratory) Screening of elastic forces in complex oxides

Dr Matt Segall (Optibrium Ltd) From TCM to Drug Discovery: The ups and downs of biotech

Dr Alix Pryde (Vodafone) Physics to the Rescue! - How I've used my physics background to solve business problems

Dr Ian Graham (Liverpool FC) Why would a Football Club hire a Physicist?

We also enjoyed a talk on the history of TCM given by Prof Volker Heine, and the symposium ended with a Garden Party at the Cavendish followed by dinner at Volker's College, Clare College. Prof Tom McLeish gave the after-dinner speech.