Peter David Nellist is a British

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

and

materials scientist Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries. The intellectual origins of materials scien ...

, currently a professor in the Department of Materials at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. He is noted for pioneering new techniques in high-resolution

electron microscopy An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. It uses electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing i ...

Early life and career

Nellist gained his

B.A. A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree ...

(1991), M.A. (1995) and Ph.D (1996) from

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...

, and studied at the

Cavendish Laboratory The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named ...

with John Rodenburg, before taking up post-doctoral research at

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...

(ORNL) in

Tennessee Tennessee (, ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina t ...

with ex-Cavendish researcher Stephen Pennycook. Eighteen months later, Nellist returned to Cambridge on a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which he transferred to the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...

. He left academia for four years to work for another ex-Cambridge microscopy pioneer, Ondrej Krivanek, at Nion, his newly formed company in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

. Nellist then returned to

Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Unive ...

and finally to the University of Oxford, where he became Joint Head of the Department of Materials in 2019.

Scientific research

Nellist's research focuses on

scanning transmission electron microscopy A scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) is a type of transmission electron microscope (TEM). Pronunciation is tɛmor �sti:i:ɛm As with a conventional transmission electron microscope (CTEM), images are formed by electrons p ...

and its use in materials science. In particular, he is noted for work on electron ptychography, quantitative image interpretation, and the development of corrective electron microscope lenses, which he describes as "like spectacles for a microscope".

Achievements and awards

In the mid-1990s, working with John Rodenburg at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, he helped to devise new ways of improving the resolution of both

scanning electron microscope A scanning electron microscope (SEM) is a type of electron microscope that produces images of a sample by scanning the surface with a focused beam of electrons. The electrons interact with atoms in the sample, producing various signals that ...

s and

transmission electron microscope Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a microscopy technique in which a beam of electrons is transmitted through a specimen to form an image. The specimen is most often an ultrathin section less than 100 nm thick or a suspension on a gr ...

s. In 1998, working with Stephen Pennycook of ORNL, he recorded "the highest resolution microscope images ever made of crystal structures". Six years later, Nellist, Pennycook, and colleagues at ORNL produced the first images of atoms in a crystal on sub-Angstrom scales by using a new technique to correct the optical aberrations in a scanning transmission electron microscope. Nellist has won many awards, including the 2007 Burton Medal from the

Microscopy Society of America The Microscopy Society of America (MSA), founded in 1942 as The Electron Microscope Society of America, is a non-profit organization that provides microanalytical facilities for studies within the sciences. Currently, there are approximately 3000 me ...

for "an exceptional contribution to microscopy", the 2013

Ernst Ruska Ernst August Friedrich Ruska (; 25 December 1906 – 27 May 1988) was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope. Life and career Ernst R ...

Prize from the German Electron Microscopy Society for the development of confocal electron microscopy, the 2013 Birks Award from the Microbeam Analysis Society, and the 2016 and 2020 European Microscopy Society prizes for best published paper in materials science. He was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

in 2020. He is the vice-president of the

Royal Microscopical Society The Royal Microscopical Society (RMS) is a learned society for the promotion of microscopy. It was founded in 1839 as the Microscopical Society of London making it the oldest organisation of its kind in the world. In 1866, the Society gained it ...

(of which he was also made an Honorary Fellow in 2020) and a board member of the European Microscopy Society.

Selected publications

Books

Scientific papers

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References

External links

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Seeing is Believing: How observing atoms in the electron microscope helps develop tomorrow's materials
A schools outreach talk by Peter Nellist explaining his work on electron microscopy. {{DEFAULTSORT:Nellist, Peter Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Birmingham Fellows of the Royal Society British materials scientists Microscopists English physicists