Michael Ashfold - Biography#
Ashfold is renowned internationally for his work in many areas of gas and solution phase photochemistry, for his use of laser diagnostic methods to probe plasmas (e.g. those used for the chemical vapour deposition of diamond) and for his growth of thin films, nanorod arrays, etc. by pulsed laser ablation methods.
He has been a Visiting Scientist at the Universities of Bielefeld, Amsterdam, Kyoto, Moscow State and S. California, and at Sandia (Livermore), NIST (Gaithersburg), STELAB (Nagoya) and FORTH (Crete), and is in demand as a plenary/keynote lecturer at leading conferences in his fields of interest (e.g. RACI National Centenary Conf., Melbourne (7/2017), Dynamics of Molecular Collisions, Lake Tahoe (7/2017), Stereodynamics, Taipei (11/2016), Advanced Particle Imaging Techniques, Telluride (7/2016), 7th Inter. Conf. on Plasma Spectroscopy, Inuyama (6/2016), American Vacuum Soc., 62nd Internat. Symp., San Jose, 10/2015, iCOMET, Chengdu (10/2015), Molecules and Light III, Zakapone, 10/2015, 26th Int. Symp. on Molecular Beams, Segovia (7/2015), APS March Mtg., San Antonio, 3/2015, Advances in Structure and Dynamics, Bangalore, 1/2015).
He has published >420 peer reviewed papers, supervised >50 students to successful PhD completion and hosted >30 postdoctoral researchers, and currently leads a large (£4.5M, 5 year) Bristol/Oxford EPSRC Programme Grant.
Ashfold was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2009.
He was President of the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) from 2009-12, and was the founding Chair of the Editorial Board of Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics (PCCP). He currently Chairs the RSC Science Education and Industry Board and is a member of RSC Council.
He was a founding member of the Physical Sciences Panel (PE4) of the ERC’s Starting Independent Research and Consolidators Programmes, serving as Deputy Chair (2011) and Chair (2013).
He was a Member of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework panel for Chemistry, and currently serves on the External Scientific Advisory Boards of the MPI fur Biophysikalische Chemie (Gottingen), the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge.
