Terence G. Langdon - Biography#

Langdon obtained a B.Sc. degree in Physics from the University of Bristol in 1961 and a Ph.D. in Physical Metallurgy from Imperial College, University of London, in 1965. Following post-doctoral appointments at the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia, he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Southern California in 1971 and promoted to Professor in 1976. He was appointed as the William E. Leonhard Professor of Engineering in 2003 and held this position until 2011 when he received an ERC Advanced Grant. He then took a full-time position as Professor of Materials Science at the University of Southampton in the U.K. and was appointed Professor Emeritus at USC. He has held numerous short-term appointments around the world including at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Kyushu University in Japan, the Riso National Laboratory and the Danish Technical University in Denmark, the International Centre for Advanced Studies in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. From 1993 until 2000 he was Chairman of the International Committee on Superplasticity in Advanced Materials and in this capacity he organized international superplasticity conferences in Moscow, Russia (1994), Bangalore, India (1997) and Orlando, Florida (2000).

He was the first outside of Russia to start working on the processing of bulk ultrafine-grained metals with submicrometer or nanometer grain sizes and he published the first western paper in this field in 1993 (J. Materials Research, 8, 2810, 1993, with 151 citations). Since that time, the field of ultrafine-grained materials has become one of the major activities within Materials Science. He co-founded and is a member of the International Steering Committee on Nanomaterials by Severe Plastic Deformation which coordinates the NanoSPD conferences (the most recent held in Metz, France, in July 2014). He established excellent facilities for this type of research at USC in the 1990's and more recently, with the ERC Advanced Grant, he established similar facilities at the University of Southampton.