Prof Bala Vaidhyanathan (BV) is a Professor of Advanced Materials and Processing and was the Associate Dean for Enterprise at the School of Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering at Loughborough University (LU). He leads the very active Advanced Ceramics Research Group in the Materials Department and has over 200 peer reviewed publications (>5050 citations, h-index 39), named inventor on 17 patents, delivered >60 Plenary/keynote/invited presentations in international and national conferences and written six book chapters. He is the Editor of Advances in Applied Ceramics and on the Editorial Board for four International Materials Journals. He held/holds >47 research grants totalling >£30.5M and many of these are with multi-partner, multi-institutional involvements and 38 of them had direct industrial contribution. Vaidhyanathan has pioneered the development of energy efficient microwave, flash and hybrid methods for the advanced processing of functional ceramic materials and Loughborough is currently regarded as one of the world leaders in the utilization of these techniques. He is one of the leading exponents in the field of microwave-assisted materials processing, additive manufacturing of advanced ceramics, pioneered the development of many FAST sintering facilities for the processing advanced materials/devices. The range of products worked on has been very wide for energy, electronic, defence and healthcare applications.
