Dr. James Dean | Source | CEO and Founder at Plastometrex

James has an undergraduate degree (BEng) from Imperial College, London, in Materials Science and Engineering. He also has a Masters Degree (MSc) from Cranfield University in Thermal Power (Gas Turbine Engineering) where he was supported with a Rolls Royce UTC Scholarship. He then obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, with funding from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Ministry of Defence). He has since held Research Assistant and Senior Research Associate positions at Cambridge, supporting research activities in the field of indentation testing and advanced numerical modelling. During this period, he wrote and delivered a lecture course to undergraduate and graduate students on The Finite Element Method. He is a recipient of an Armourers and Brasiers’ Fellowship Award.

In 2011 he joined the leading systems and engineering technology company, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, supporting projects in the aerospace and nuclear industries. He then returned to Cambridge in 2012 to pursue research into the development of methods and models for the measurement of material strength parameters from indentation data. He has published over 30 papers concerning the deformation and mechanics of materials, has delivered several invited talks and plenary lectures at international conferences, and has an international reputation in the field of indentation and finite element analysis.

James also established (in 2012) his own consultancy firm, Double Precision Consultancy (DPC), which specialises in the provision of mathematical and multiphysics modelling services to a wide range of industrial clients. James sold this company to Element Materials Technology in January 2021.

In February 2018 he joined the Centre for Scientific Computing at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (Department of Physics), where he accepted a position as Coordinator of the EPSRC-funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Computational Methods for Materials Science.

In 2019 James left the University of Cambridge after 15 years to concentrate on activities associated with Plastometrex, which he co-founded in late 2018.