Nuclear safeguards, contamination monitoring.

Malcolm Joyce holds a Personal Chair in Nuclear Engineering at Lancaster University, and is currently Head of the Engineering Department at Lancaster.   His industrial experience includes Smith System Engineering Ltd., BNFL plc. and most recently as Technical Director of Hybrid Instruments Ltd.

His area of research interest is in the field of Control & Instrumentation (C&I), and the development of radiation detection instruments including: portable neutron spectrometry; decommissioning-related analytical methods; nuclear policy and environmental consequences; medical radiotherapy and radiation effects.  He is author on > 130 refereed journal articles including 26 refereed outputs and 2 patents since 2008, primarily in the field of digital mixed-field radiation assay with fast, organic liquid scintillation detectors.  Prior to this he spent four years in research in industry.  His h-index is 26.

Professor Joyce's research interest in this area began with the use of digital processing methods for applications in neutron spectrometry.  This work underpinned an application for an EPSRC Instrumentation Development award for the development of an advanced portable neutron spectrometer.  This stimulated the launch in 2003 of a spin-out company, Hybrid Instruments Ltd., see www.hybridinstruments.com . Subsequently, MJJ led one of the first Think Crime! research projects awarded by the EPSRC in 2004 entitled DISTINGUISH.  This project focussed on the mixed-field radiation detection method developed on the spectrometer based on the fast digitization of events from fast, organic liquid scintillation detectors.  Subsequent research, spanning a number of PhD awards, pioneered a novel algorithm for the ultra-fast, digital pulse-shape discrimination of neutrons and gamma rays[1], and led to a dedicated instrument that exploits this ultra-fast processing capability[2].  When combined with an astronomical scanning platform for imaging, this pioneered the first, real-time 2D-scanning technique to deconvolve neutrons and gamma rays into separate images[3] with a single detector.  Prof Joyce also has extensive research interests of relevance to nuclear decommissioning, including the depth profiling of entrained radioactivity[4].

Professor Joyce has supervised 19 PhD students to completion since 2003.  He was the Scientific Chair of the Nuclear Institute's International Conference on Control & Instrumentation for Nuclear Installations (September 2011).  He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Nuclear Institute.  He is Editor-in-Chief on the Elsevier journal 'Progress in Nuclear Energy'. He has provided consultancy to Lockheed Martin, BAE SYSTEMS, Rolls Royce plc., NNL and the MoD.  He led the team in 2010 that researched and wrote the Nuclear Lessons Learned report[5], on behalf of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Engineering the Future, which was commended by the Minister of State for Energy, HMG Chief Scientist and Lord Browne. He has related research interests associated with the behaviour of fluids, fusion and clinical radiotherapy.  In October 2012, the degree of Doctor of Engineering (DEng) was conferred upon him in recognition of his contribution to the field of Fast Neutron Digitization and Related Analytical Methods.