Chris Lorenz is the Head of the Department of Engineering, King's College London. A Professor of Computational Materials Science, Chris received a combined BS/MS in chemical engineering at the University of Michigan in 1997. Chris continued on to earn his PhD in chemical engineering in 2001 at the University of Michigan, under the supervision of Prof. Robert Ziff, with whom he investigated ‘Chemical Engineering Applications of Percolation Theory.’

In 2001, Chris moved to Albuquerque, NM to work as a postdoc in Multi-scale Materials and Molecular Biology Simulations group at Sandia National Laboratories. In Dec. 2005, Chris moved to Ames, IA where he worked as a research fellow in the Physics Department of Iowa State University and Ames National Laboratory. Chris was appointed as a lecturer at King’s College London in May 2007.

Research Interests

Chris is very interested in using his expertise in molecular and atomistic scale simulations to study the structural and mechanical properties of materials in biological, colloidal, interfacial and ionic systems. Recently, some of the areas that have drawn his attention are:

• Electrokinetic effects of ionic solutions in silica nanochannels
• Interfacial behaviour of water near titanium and silicon oxide surfaces
• The effect of molecular structure on the self-assembly of block copolymers into micelles and thin films
• The structural properties of proteins near mixed lipid membranes and/or self-assembled monolayers
• The hydration of colloidal micelles and mixed lipid bilayers
• The structural properties of confined water between self-assembled monolayers
• The structural and nanotribological properties of self-assembled monolayers
• The mechanical properties of bio-derived epoxy adhesives