Meet Professor Chris Lorenz - new Head of Engineering

Congratulations on the new appointment, how does it feel to be the new Head of Department for Engineering?

I'm super excited - this an opportunity for me to return to Engineering - my original discipline, and take on some additional leadership, which is something that I've been keen to do for a couple years now. The department, which was only set up in 2019 is really flourishing, so it's an exciting time to help continue to establish and grow Engineering at King's. 

I also served as the Interim Head of the Department of Physics for about six months during the initial response to the pandemic, which was obviously quite a challenging time. But it gave me the experience of what being the Head of the Department is like. At that time, I wasn't quite ready to pursue it full-time, but I believe now is the right time.

What are your priorities for the first six months as Head of Department?

The first thing on my list is just to get to know everyone and re-know everyone in the department: academic staff, the professional services team, and then of course the postgraduate community of PhD students and postdocs.

The department has grown so fast over the past five years, and now I believe that we are in a good spot to become increasingly outward-facing. I think of engineering as applied science, and it's the route for chemistry and physics to be translated into application. The fact that I can move from Engineering to Physics and back to Engineering just shows that the boundaries between disciplines are blurring. There's a lot of opportunity for us to work closely with people in Chemistry, Physics, Maths, and there's already good link with Informatics, and it makes sense to further develop our work with departments outside of the Faculty, such as Biomedical Engineering. It would be great if our two departments can continue to work increasingly well together and raise the profile of engineering across the board at King's.

There're two main undergraduate education programmes: Electronic Engineering and General Engineering. I want to continue to support both these programmes and continue to raise their profile. There's some development and growth we can also do on the Master’s level offerings.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and career to date, as well as a few highlights?

I received a combined BS/MS in chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. After earning my PhD, I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to work as a postdoc at Sandia National Laboratories. There I was introduced to the research that we do now, which I really enjoyed. I then moved to Ames, Iowa where I worked as a research fellow in the Physics Department of Iowa State University.

It was there that I learned about an opportunity in Engineering at King's. My interview was on Thanksgiving, and I was unimpressed by that because I wanted to be at home eating turkey and watching American football! I was 95% sure I wasn't going to get the job. However, I came back to my room and I had a text message and email saying "congratulations", which was quite a shock. After the Division of Engineering closed, I was offered a position in the Department of Physics, where I've been ever since.

My career highlights during that time included my brief tenure as Interim Head of Department and the time I spent serving as the Associate Director of a doctoral training centre, Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Non-Equilibrium Systems (CANES). The quality of students that came out of it was impressive, and it was rewarding to be a part of it.

Many people might be surprised to see a physicist as the new Head of Engineering, but this is more of a homecoming for you, isn't it?

From an educational perspective I'm closer aligned to engineering. This goes back to the type of research I do, which involves using computers to study different types of materials. If you were to look across the academic landscape, you would find people like me doing similar work in departments ranging from Chemistry and Physics to Biophysics, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. My field of research can be found in different departments, depending on the focus of the group. 

If you could only take one piece of music, one tool and one famous celeb (alive or dead) to a desert island, who or what would you take and why?

I'm a huge sports fan, so I'd love to take Jim Harbaugh, a former American football player and Head Coach at the University of Michigan, as an example of leadership that I'm interested in.

I would take a chess board so that when Jim and I get bored talking about American football, we could play a game together. I'm not very good at it, but it's something I've recently gotten into and am getting better at.

I listen to different types of music, but one of my favourite albums is Seven's Travels by Atmosphere. In one of the songs (“Always Coming Back Home to You”), he talks about the Midwest of the United States and all of its various small towns. Of course, that's where I'm from, and this song is very nostalgic for me.