History Committee

John Hutchison Hon FRMS

History Committee Chair, University of Oxford

John’s involvement with the RMS started 40 years ago when his micrograph entry won first prize in the 1974 competition. He was awarded a Certificate and the Glauert Medal by the then President Gerard L’E Turner.

John joined the Materials Science Section in 1984, and later the Electron Microscopy Section. Following a six year stint as Executive Honorary Secretary, he was elected President for the period 2002 – 2004, during which time he had the opportunity to present Gerard L’E Turner with an Honorary Fellowship, almost 30 years after receiving his own competition prize from him!

In 2014, to mark the Society's 175th anniversary, John wrote a specially commissioned book 'Moving Forward' highlighting the Society's activities from 1989-2014, bridging the gap from God Bless the Microscope! by Gerard L'E Turner

Grace Burke

RMS Vice President, Idaho National Laboratory, USA

Grace, Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, is INL Laboratory Fellow at the Idaho National Laboratory, where she is scientific lead for reactor structural materials, having previously been Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  From 2011 through 2021, Grace was the Director of the Materials Performance Centre and Professor of Materials Performance in the School of Materials at the University of Manchester. She was also Director of the Electron Microscopy Centre from 2012 through 2016. Grace is a physical metallurgist for whom microstructural characterisation has always represented an integral and fundamental component of research into materials performance.  She obtained her BS in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and her PhD in Metallurgy from Imperial College of Science and Technology where her SCC research work included analytical, high voltage and in situ electron microscopy.  Grace then joined the US Steel Research Laboratory where she conducted research on ferrous alloys including the use of atom probe field-ion microscopy as a complementary technique to AEM in the investigation of commercially important materials.
Subsequently, Grace joined the Westinghouse Science & Technology Centre where she applied of combinations of AEM and APFIM techniques to a broader range of nuclear and power generation materials.  In 1994 she moved to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in order to focus her research on the environment-sensitive behaviour of engineering alloys in nuclear reactors, and, in 2009, was the first woman to be promoted to the highest scientific position, Consultant.
At Manchester and her subsequent positions, Grace has continued her to employ her established portfolio of advanced techniques to address a range of materials issues to investigate precursor reactions of material degradation liquids and gases, and irradiation-induced behaviour.  Grace was the 2005 President of the Microscopy Society of America and has been a Fellow of RMS since 1988. She is also a Fellow of ASM International, the Microscopy Society of America, the Microanalysis Society, IOM3 (UK), and TMS (USA). 

Paul Brown

University of Nottingham

Paul D Brown is Professor of Materials Characterisation, Director of Research Equipment (Faculty of Engineering), & Co-Director of the Nanoscale & Microscale Research Centre (nmRC) at the University of Nottingham (UoN).  The nmRC hosts a suite of ~ 20 high-tech analytical facilities (accessed by > 800 users), enabling a broad range of interdisciplinary materials science research programmes of interest to the engineering, physical and life sciences communities. PDB was previously member of the RMS Council (2003-2006), and the IoP EMAG committee (1999-2008) including terms as Honorary Secretary / Treasurer (2002–2004) and Chairman (2004-2006). PDB is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and was awarded DSc by UoN in 2014. PDB’s research interests are in innovative methods in EM imaging and analysis with emphasis on interrelationships between the processing, structure and properties of materials, down to the nanoscale

Peter Evennett Hon FRMS

Honorary Archivist, University of Leeds (retired)

Peter took his first degree in Zoology at the University of Liverpool, and his PhD at St Andrews, during which time his interests in microscopy developed. He lectured in Zoology at the University of Leeds for 30 years, with a particular interest in animal physiology and histology, cell biology and light and electron microscopy. He retired early from the University and since then has concentrated on his interests in microscopy, including teaching for the RMS and other organisations at home and abroad. He is particularly interested in finding simple ways of teaching and demonstrating the fundamental principles of the microscope to both professional and amateur microscopists. He has taken part in the RMS’s schools’ Outreach activities from the start, and assists in raising funds by recycling redundant equipment to amateur microscopists. Peter has been a member of the RMS for many years, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Chris Guerin

Chris Guerin received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1991, studying retinal degeneration/regeneration using electron microscopy, immunohistochemistry and autoradiography. He had posts as a senior scientist in Michigan and the MRC Toxicology unit in Leicester before being appointed as the head of the microscopy core in the VIB Department of Molecular Biochemical Research in Ghent Belgium. He oversaw the establishment of the VIB Bioimaging core in Ghent and was an early adopter and proponent of Volume Electron Microscopy techniques including Focused Ion Beam and Serial Block Face SEM. The core pioneered vEM studies in correlative light and electron microscopy and provided support for high-resolution light and EM experiments to the VIB and broader scientific community. He retired in 2019 and is now active in the vEM community initiative. He is a fellow of the RMS which, he joined after moving to the UK in 1998, and has taught at the RMS light microscopy summer school since 2007.

Chris Hammond

Keeper of the Collection, University of Leeds (retired)

Chris, formerly Senior Lecturer in Materials at the University of Leeds, has had a long association with the RMS. Together with a small group of council members he was involved in the establishment of the AMFES initiative in 1995, from which the Outreach and Education programme has largely grown. His motivation is the belief that a child's curiosity about the natural world can be nurtured, from the simplest level, by the observations and discoveries which can be made with the microscope.

In 2015, Chris was awarded the first RMS President's Medal.

Lynne Joyce

Past RMS Honorary Treasurer, Agar Scientific (Retired)

Prior to retiring in 2014 Dr Lynne Joyce was Director of Market Development at Agar Scientific. Lynne graduated with a BA in Biology from the University of York and was awarded her PhD in Plant Sciences­ from the University of Newcastle. Her first position was with the Lord Rank Research Centre (Rank Hovis McDougall) in High Wycombe where she worked initially on the wheat breeding program and then trained in the electron microscopy unit with Roger Angold. In 1982 she joined Agar Aids (now Agar Scientific) to work with company-founder Alan Agar and was soon appointed Sales Director and then later in 1992 Managing Director, a position she held until 2008.

Lynne became a member of the RMS in 1987 and was invited to join the Trade Advisory Committee (now known as the Corporate Advisory Board) in 1992, where she was an active member until her retirement. Lynne first term as Honorary Treasurer began in 1995 and ran for 10 years (the maximum term permitted).

Chris Kennedy

RMS Honorary Historian

Michelle Peckham

Executive Honorary Secretary, University of Leeds

Michelle is Professor of Cell Biology in the Faculty of Biological Sciences. She obtained a BA in Physiology of Organisms at the University of York, and a PhD in Physiology at University College London. She moved to King's College London, and started to use a specialised form of light microscopy (birefringence) to investigate muscle crossbridge orientation. She then worked at UCSF, San Francisco for a year, where she used fluorescence polarisation to investigate muscle crossbridges. She moved back to the UK, to the University of York, to work on insect flight muscle. In 1990 she was awarded a Royal Society University Research fellowship, based at King's College London, and began working on the cell and molecular biology of muscle development, and started to use live cell imaging to investigate muscle cell behaviour in cultured cells, and confocal microscopy to investigate their cytoskeleton. She collaborated with Graham Dunn to use Digitally Recorded Interference Microscopy with Automatic Phase Shifting (DRIMAPS) to investigate cell crawling behaviour. She moved to Leeds in 1997 as a Lecturer, and has continued to use a wide range of both light and electron microscopy approaches to investigate the molecular motors and the cytoskeleton.

Tony Wilson Hon FRMS

University of Oxford

Tony Wilson is a former President of the Society and a previous General Editor of the Journal of Microscopy. His research in optical microscopy has the overall aim of developing a variety of high resolution imaging techniques for applications in areas ranging from the life sciences to industrial metrology. His main interest lies in the theory and implementation of scanning optical microscopes and, in particular, the development of and applications of confocal microscopy. He and his colleagues have introduced a number of diverse techniques into confocal microscopy such as fibre optics, laser feedback, extended depth-of-focus imaging, fast aberration free optical focussing and adaptive optics. The structured illumination technique as other ‘light efficient’ methods of obtaining optical sectioning have been commercialised from his laboratory. He is Professor of Engineering Science and a Fellow of Hertford College at the University of Oxford. Professor Tony Wilson is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in recognition of his seminal contributions to confocal microscopy, arguably one of the most significant advances in light microscopy in the last century.