TCD Provost Dr Prendergast and Professor John Pethica Elected to Royal Academy of Engineering

Posted on: 30 July 2013

The Provost of Trinity College Dublin, Dr Patrick Prendergast, and Professor of Physics, John Pethica, have been elected as  Fellows to the Royal Academy of Engineering. They are among 60 new Fellows to the academy and join some of the UK’s most accomplished engineers from academia and business.

Sir John Parker GBE FREng, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, commented: “We warmly welcome our new Fellows to the Academy. With their expertise, knowledge and vision we will continue to strengthen our ambition of providing authoritative, impartial, and expert engineering advice to government and to develop the Academy’s growing impact and influence on a global stage.”

With a first degree in engineering, Dr Prendergast (FREng FIEI MRIA) was a pioneer of biomechanics. Before he became Provost he was founding director of the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering and, from 2007, Professor of Bioengineering.

His areas of research include tools for computer simulation in mechanobiology, the science of how mechanical forces affect biological growth and remodelling, with particular reference in recent work to stem cell engineering. He has also studied the computational modelling of medical device performance.

Another Trinity academic, Professor John Pethica (FREng FRS FInstP), Professor of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, has also been elected to the academy. Professor Pethica was founding director of CRANN and the Naughton Institute  and also holds the post of Chief Scientific Advisor at the UK National Physical Laboratory.

His research has been in nanotechnology, in the fields of surfaces, thin films, atomic- and nano-scale structures. He devised the technique of nano-indentation for the mechanical characterisation of surfaces and thin films, which now has broad applications across surface coating and manufacturing industries. He presently works on mechanics of thin polymer films for lithography and device applications, and also on atomic scale manipulation at surfaces.