President’s Chair in Earth Sciences in the Asian School of the Environment, Dean of the College of Science

Professor Redfern is a mineralogist, trained as a crystallographer, who is interested in the links between atomic scale structure and the physical and chemical properties of planetary materials, from Earth’s oceans to its core. His scientific research career, focussed on mineral sciences and more broadly within geosciences, spans more than 35 years. He completed his PhD in 1989 at the University of Cambridge, Department of Earth Sciences, and until 2019 has held a full time academic appointment in a UK HEI. Initially, upon graduating with his PhD, he was appointed in 1989 at the University of Manchester as Lecturer in Geochemical Spectroscopy joint between Geology and Chemistry. Subsequently, in 1994, he returned to Cambridge as a Lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences, and was then promoted to Reader and then Professor. In 2016 I he became Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He left Cambridge in 2019 to move to NTU and take up the post of President’s Chair in Earth Sciences, alongside the role of Dean of the College of Science. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge.

He is the recipient of the European Mineralogical Society’s Medal for Research Excellence and is the only individual to have been awarded both the Max Hey and Schlumberger Medals of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, of which he is a Fellow. He is also Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America and of the Geological Society of London. Professor Redfern is keen to translate scientific discovery to wider audiences and served as a British Science Association Media Fellow working alongside journalists at the BBC for some time. He was also a member of the UK ministerially-appointed Committee on Radioactive Waste Management charged with providing independent scrutiny of the development of a geological radioactive waste repository in the UK.