Professor Malcolm Joyce

Research Interests

Malcolm Joyce holds a Personal Chair in Nuclear Engineering at Lancaster University, is Cross-faculty Associate Dean for Research and was previously Associate Dean for Research in FST and Head of the Department of Engineering from 2008-2015. His industrial experience includes Smith System Engineering Ltd., BNFL plc. and most recently as Technical Director of Hybrid Instruments Ltd. Recent examples of his research include: the association of ultra-trace level plutonium in the ground with legacy breeder reactor operations (Nature Communications, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21575-9), radiation-induced production of low-carbon fuel additives from biodiesel wastes (Communications Chemistry, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-021-00572-5) and wireless communications with fast neutrons (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2021.165946).

He is Principal Investigator on: 'Autonomous Inspection for Responsive and Sustainable Nuclear Fuel Manufacture (AIRS-NFM, EP/V051059/1, £1.9M); Advancing Location Accuracy via Collimated Nuclear Assay for Decommissioning Robotic Applications (ALACANDRA, EP/V026941/1, £1.5M), 'AMS-UK: A UK Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility for Nuclear Fission Research (EPSRC, EP/T01136X/1, NNUF Phase 2, £2.8M) and 'JUNO: A Network for Japan - UK Nuclear Opportunities' (EP/P013600/1), and Co-I on a number of projects, inc. the NNUF Management Grant (EP/T011351/1, £7.4M). His research group currently comprises 3 post-doctoral research associates, 1 Experimental Officer and 6 research students.

His area of research interest concerns the imaging of radiation emissions from operating nuclear reactors, the combination of radiation detection assessments with robots and trace assay of plutonium. He is author on > 180 refereed journal articles, has a h-index of 30 (Scopus) and was sole author on Engineering impact case studies submitted to both REF2014 and REF2021.

Professor Joyce has been primary supervisor to >25 PhD students, he is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Nuclear Institute. He was Editor on the Elsevier journal Progress in Nuclear Energy (2012-2022), and is Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science and the European Journal of Physics N (EPJ-N). He is a member of the UK Government's Nuclear Industry Research Advisory Board (NIRAB), co-chair of the National Nuclear User Facility (NNUF) and a member of the UKAEA Programme Advisory Committee.

He was awarded the James Watt medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in 2014 and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2016. He wrote: 'Nuclear Engineering: A Conceptual Guide to Nuclear Power', published by Butterworth-Heinemann in 2017.