duddell

Duddell Medal and Prize:

Institute of Physics:1986

Citation from Physics Bulletin 1986

Dr C C Windsor of the Materials Physics and Metallurgy Division at AERE Harwell has been awarded the Duddell Medal and Prize for his many contributions to the study of condensed matter by neutron scattering. An Individual Merit scientist at Harwell since 1976, Colin Windsor is one of the world's foremost authorities on the use of neutron scattering for studying condensed matter, with over 100 publications to his name. He has exploited pulsed neutron methods with accelerators, and is the author of the definitive book on the subject, Pulsed Neutron Scattering (Taylor and Francis 1981). He has applied these methods to basic studies of magnetic and vibrational excitations in crystals, and to practical problems such as the measurement of residual stresses in metals and the determination of minority phases in steels for the nuclear industry. Dr Windsor has spent time in the USA and Japan as an expert on neutron beam instrumentation and in 1984 he chaired a group at the Shelter Island workshop to discuss strategy for neutron beam facilities in the USA. He has recently provided design advice for the beam lines and the 'constant Q' spectrometer on the new Spallation Neutron Source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and is a member of the Science Planning Group. He has been a member of the Instrumentation Subcommittee at the Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble.

Born in Beckenham in 1938, Colin Windsor studied at Beckenham Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford, and worked for a year at Mullard Research Laboratories, Redhill, on evaporated magnetic films. He obtained a first-class physics degree in 1960 and studied for his DPhil at Oxford under Dr Griffiths, on the Magnetic properties of coupled systems. In 1964 he was a research associate at Yale University, USA, returning to a research fellowship at Harwell in 1965. In 1972 he was appointed group leader of 'Neutron physics' there, and last year he was upgraded to senior scientist. His activities on behalf of the Institute of Physics have included Board membership of Journal of Physics F, organising the historical exhibition at the Neutron Anniversary conference in Cambridge in 1982 and secretaryship of the Solid State Physics Subcommittee since 1980. He is married with three children and his hobbies are music, tennis and squash.