Ian Ward (physicist)

Ian Macmillan Ward FRS FInstP (9 April 1928 – 5 November 2018)[3] was a British physicist specialising in polymer science. He was Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds and Visiting Professor at the University of Bradford. He was the first Director of the Polymer Interdisciplinary Research Centre and was Chairman of the School of Physics and Astronomy and Cavendish Professor at Leeds.[4][5]

Ian Macmillan Ward

FRS
Born(1928-04-09)9 April 1928[1]
Stockton-on-Tees[2]
Died5 November 2018(2018-11-05) (aged 90)
Bramhope, Leeds
Alma materUniversity of Oxford (MA, DPhil)
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions

Early life and education

Ward was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne and Magdalen College, Oxford.[1]

Career

Ward joined the Fibres division of the Imperial Chemical Industries as Technical Officer in 1954. Following a secondment to the Division of Applied Mathematics of Brown University (1961–1962), he became the Head of the Basic Physics Section at the company. In 1965, he joined the University of Leeds as a Lecturer in Physics of Materials, becoming a Professor of Physics in 1970 and Cavendish Professor in 1989, before retiring in 1994.[1][2] He chaired the Department of Physics at Leeds from 1975 until 1978 and from 1987 until 1989.[1][6] He served as the president of the British Society of Rheology from 1984 until 1986.[1] In 1989, he became the first Director of the Polymer Interdisciplinary Research Centre, holding the position until 1994.[1][2]

He published 700 peer-reviewed journal articles, 6 textbooks and 20 major patents.[4] He served as Editor of the journal Polymer published by Elsevier.[4][7] He was managing director of several University of Leeds spin-off companies. These include Vantage Polymers for single polymer self-reinforced composites, die-drawn ropes and tubes, and Leeds Lithium Power for thermoreversible, ionically conducting polymer gel electrolytes used to manufacture lithium batteries.[4][5]

Awards and honours

Ward received awards from the Institute of Physics: Charles Vernon Boys Medal (1993), Glazebrook Medal (2004) – and the Institute of Materials: Griffith Medal (1982), Swinburne Medal (1988) and the Netlon Award (2004).[1][4][5] In 1993, he received a honorary doctorate from the University of Bradford.[2][4]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983.[4] His certificate of election reads:

Physicist. Distinguished for his comprehensive investigations of properties of solid polymers and their relation to structure. The main thread through his work has been the elucidation of mechanical behaviour in highly anisotropic systems. He established the comprehensive methodology for characterising such systems, involving a wide range of mechanical, spectroscopic and other structure techniques. Through these he established correlations between properties and structure which have greatly contributed to the understanding of the behaviour of these systems and to the achievement of desired properties by planned orientation procedures. In the latter respect his work has led to the attainment of ultraoriented fibrous material of greatly enhanced stiffness and strength. Professor Ward also made salient contributions to viscoelastic relaxations, non-linear viscoelasticity, yield behaviour and to the study of molecular conformations by spectroscopic methods.[8]

The Ian Macmillan Ward Prize for the Best Student Publication, awarded every two years to PhD students by the Institute of Physics Polymer Physics Group, is named in his honour.[9][10]

In 2013, the Department of Materials of ETH Zurich awarded him the Staudinger–Durrer Prize in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the field of mechanical properties of solid polymers and polymer-based composites.[4][5][11][6]

Major works
  • Ward, I. M. (2012). Mechanical properties of solid polymers. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-119-96711-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ward, I. M. (2004). An introduction to the mechanical properties of solid polymers. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-49626-7.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ward, I. M. (2000). Solid Phase Processing of Polymers. Munich: Hanser. ISBN 3-446-19622-6.
  • Ward, I. M. (1997). Structure and properties of oriented polymers. Dordrecht: Springer. ISBN 978-94-011-5844-2.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ward, I. M. (1987). Developments in Oriented Polymers--2. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. ISBN 978-94-009-3427-6.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Ward, I. M. (1962). "Optical and Mechanical Anisotropy in Crystalline Polymers". Proceedings of the Physical Society. IOP Publishing. 80 (5): 1176–1188. doi:10.1088/0370-1328/80/5/319. ISSN 0370-1328.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
gollark: Apparently the GPU acquired 76MB of memory for no apparent reason.
gollark: It is *3* powerful.
gollark: Just offload your compilation to my Raspberry Pi.
gollark: Oh, it's in `opt`.
gollark: On Alpine.

References
  1. "WARD, Prof. Ian Macmillan". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription or UK public library membership required) (subscription required)
  2. The international who's who 2004. London: Europa. 2003. p. 1775. ISBN 978-1-85743-217-6.
  3. Professor Ian Macmillan Ward
  4. "Ian Ward". London: Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 10 July 2017. Retrieved 9 March 2016.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link), "Intellectual property rights"
  5. "Professor Ian Ward". Energy at Leeds. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
  6. "Materials Day 2013 – Today, Tomorrow and Beyond". ETH Zurich. 16 January 2016. Retrieved 24 September 2017.
  7. "Journal History :: Celebrating the 50th Anniverary of Polymer :: The International Journal for the Science and Technology of Polymers". Celebrating the 50th Anniverary of Polymer. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
  8. "EC/1983/37: Ward, Ian Macmillan". The Royal Society. Retrieved 21 September 2017.
  9. Physics, Institute of. "Ian Macmillan Ward Prize for the Best Student Publication". Institute of Physics – For physics • For physicists • For all. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
  10. MaPS. "Ian Ward: School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds". Home. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
  11. "Staudinger-Durrer Prize". ETH Zurich. 15 January 2016. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
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