Ian M. Reaney joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 1994 first as a PDRA, then as a Lecturer in 1995, followed by promotion to a personal chair in 2007, followed by becoming the Dyson Chair in Ceramics in 2016. He attained his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1989 and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Essex before joining the group of Professor Setter at the Laboratoire de Ceramique, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland in 1991. He is the European site director for the NSF-funded Centre for Dielectrics and Piezoelectrics and the Director of Research and Innovation at MSE.