Professor Arthur F Willoughby BSc(Eng), PhD, ARSM, DIC, C.Eng, FIMMM, FInstP, FRSA
Emeritus Professor
Professor Arthur F W Willoughby is Emeritus Professor within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton
Arthur Willoughby graduated with BSc (Eng) (1st Class) in Metallurgy from Imperial College in 1961, and was awarded the Bessemer Medal and Charles Salter Prize, and,after a period at AECL, Chalk River, Canada, obtained a PhD from Imperial College in 1965, for which he was awarded the Matthey Prize for research.
He was subsequently elected to FIMMM and CEng. Appointed to an ICI Fellowship at the University of Southampton in 1965, he subsequently joined the academic staff, and was promoted to a Personal Chair in Electronic Materials in 1983. He was Head of Engineering Materials for over 10 years from 1986, and Deputy Dean of the Faculty, as well as a member of the University Management Group.
Regarding teaching, he was appointed Director of the M.Eng courses across the then Faculty of Engineering following his period as Head of Engineering Materials. He was elected President of the Southampton Association of University Teachers. He served several periods as External Assessor of new courses and External Examiner with the Open University from 1990, and was presented with a special award by the Open University in 1995.
His research has concentrated on doping, defects and diffusion in semiconductor materials, and works closely with many companies and research organisations worldwide. His most recent research has been part of collaborative projects with groups across Europe funded by the European Union.
He has been an invited speaker to many International Conferences, including regular invitations to the prestigious Gordon Conferences in the USA. He has been chairman of the Electronics Application Divisional Board of the Institute of Materials, and a member of Council and the Materials Strategy Commission, and Chairman of several International Conferences on Materials for Microelectronics.
He was elected to the Functional Materials Peer Review College of EPSRC and has chaired Panels on special programmes. Internationally, he has been a member of the Electronic Materials Committee of the TMS (USA), and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Electronic Materials, published by TMS.
He was founding Editor of ‘Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics (Springer), and Editor in Chief of that journal for 27 years from its inception in 1990, editing a 25th Anniversary special edition in 2015, and seeing a progressive increase in Impact Factor to over 2.0 when he retired as Editor in Chief in 2017, when it had become by far the largest journal in this field.
He was also one of the founding Editors of the journal ‘Materials Letters’(Elsevier), from its inception in 1982, and remains a senior editor of that journal after almost 40 years. In book editing, he is a founding series editor of two book series, publishing a total of over 35 books in his field, comprising 8 books on Electronic Materials published by Chapman and Hall and Kluwer, followed by a series of over 27 books on Materials on Materials for Electronic and Optoelectronic Applications published by Wiley.
As part of the latter series, he co-authored a book on ‘Solar Cell Materials’ in 2014 jointly with Prof Gavin Conibeer from UNSW, Australia.
Internationally, Professor Willoughby was a member of the International Directory Board of the International Training Institute for Materials Science founded in Vietnam in 1993, with European support, pioneering higher degrees and research in Vietnam and eventually completing a new building for these studies in Hanoi, in which he has regularly taught groups of Vietnamese students.