Lancaster Engineering PhD student Dan Seal has been awarded the Harry Jones Prize by the British Cryogenics Council.

The prize is given annually for the best UK thesis in the field of experimental applied science in the field of cryogenics.

The 2025 prize was awarded for Dan’s thesis “Development of a High Throughput Facility for the Radio Frequency (RF) Characterisation of Superconducting Thin Films”.

For his PhD Dan developed a novel facility to measure the superconducting properties of thin films developed as part of the Cockcroft Institute Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) thin films for particle accelerators. This is part of research by the Accelerator Science and Technology Centre (ASTeC), part of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) as well as collaborators throughout Europe enabling key insights leading to optimisation of the deposition process.

His PhD was supervised by Professor Graeme Burt from the School of Engineering and Oleg Malyshev from the STFC.

Professor Burt said: “I am delighted that Dan has won this prize, and it’s very well deserved as it is an excellent thesis. His research has been critical in the development of thin film SRF for accelerators, and the facility continues to generate new research.”

Since graduating Dan has been employed by STFC-ASTeC performing further studies with the facility, as well as developing new facilities to measure at lower frequencies.

As part of the prize Dan gave a special seminar, presented in collaboration between the British Cryogenics Council and the Cockcroft Institute where Professor Damian Hampshire, Chair of the British Cryogenics Council, presented him with the prize. Following this, Dan delivered a seminar on his work entitled: From Bulk Niobium to Thin Films - Advancing SRF with High Throughput Cryogenic RF Characterisation.