Nuclear safeguards, contamination monitoring, radiation imaging, environmental assay, robotic deployment.
Malcolm Joyce holds a Personal Chair in Nuclear Engineering at Lancaster University, is Associate Dean for Research (Cross-faculty) and was Head of the Department of Engineering from 2008-2015. His industrial experience includes Smith System Engineering Ltd., BNFL plc. and most recently as Technical Director of Hybrid Instruments Ltd. He is Principal Investigator on 'AMS-UK: A UK Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility for Nuclear Fission Research (EPSRC, EP/T01136X/1, NNUF Phase 2, £3.6M) and Co-I on the NNUF Management Grant (EP/T011351/1, £7.4M), EP/P018505/1 'TORONE - TOtal characterisation for Remote Observation in Nuclear Environments', EP/R0026084/1 'Robotics and Artificial Intelligence for Nuclear' and EP/P013600/1 'JUNO: A Network for Japan - UK Nuclear Opportunities': a total of £25M in grants. His research group currently comprises 2 post-doctoral research associates, 1 Experimental Officer and 6 research students.
His area of research interest is in Nuclear Engineering, particularly the imaging of radiation emissions from operating nuclear reactors, the combination of radiation detection assessments with robots and ultra-trace assay of plutonium. He is author on > 170 refereed journal articles and has specialised over the last 10 years 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 and has a h-index of 29 (Scopus). An impact case study based on Professor Joyce's research submitted to the 2014 Research Excellent Framework was assessed as being of 4* quality.
Professor Joyce has supervised >20 PhD students to completion. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Nuclear Institute. He is Editor on the Elsevier journal Progress in Nuclear Energy, and is Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science and the European Journal of Physics N (EPJ-N). He led the team in 2010 that researched and wrote the Nuclear Lessons Learned report, 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.
In October 2012, he received the degree of Doctor of Engineering (DEng) in recognition of his contribution to the field of Fast Neutron Digitization and Related Analytical Methods. He is a member of the UK Government's Nuclear Industry Research Advisory Board (NIRAB) and co-chair of the steering committee of the National Nuclear User Facility (NNUF). In 2014, he and his team were awarded the James Watt medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) for best paper in the journal Proc. ICE (Energy) for research on the depth profiling of radioactive contamination in concrete. In 2016 he was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. In 2017 he completed a textbook: 'Nuclear Engineering: A Conceptual Guide to Nuclear Power', published by Butterworth-Heinemann, 420 pp.
