Research Interests

Catherine Bishop is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering, Associate Investigator of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, and leads the Materials Cluster@UC. She leads both an MBIE Smart Idea and a Marsden research project.

She obtained a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and worked for Westinghouse, Ebara Solar and Johnson Matthey as part of her co-op degree. Dr Bishop earned a PhD in Materials Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research was part of a large NSF-EU jointly funded programme (NANOAM). She moved back to the UK for an MIT postdoc on collaborative research (INCEMS) with the Department of Materials, University of Oxford and other EU partners. She held a three-year Career Development Fellowship at the University of Oxford before joining UC in 2008.

Professor Bishop is a materials scientist who collaborates internationally and across many areas of materials research. Key current international partners are at Purdue, MIT, RPI and Forschungszentrum Julich. Current transdisciplinary collaboration includes chemical engineers, physicists, chemists and microbiologists. Her research bridges structure-property-processing-performance interrelationships in alloys and ceramics.

She was an Academic Visitor at University of Oxford (2019) and a Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2015). Dr Bishop was New Zealand partner member of HERALD EU-COST action (2015-2018), Chair of the first annual Materials@UC conference (2018) and has volunteered for MIT as an Educational Counsellor since 2015. She has convened symposia for ACerS at international conferences including MS&T 2020-2023 and been a discussion leader at prestigious Gordon Research Conferences.