LCN Professor, Neil Alford MBE FREng, has been awarded the Royal Society Armourers & Brasiers' Company Prize 2016 for his outstanding contributions to materials research with benefit to society, especially the development of ultra-low-loss microwave dielectrics for communications.

Neil said: “I am absolutely delighted and honoured to receive this award. It’s a reflection of the importance of Materials Science and it’s also a tribute to the extraordinary people I have worked with over the years.”

In 2011 he and colleague,s Mark Oxborrow and Jon Breeze, discovered that a Bragg resonator with sapphire plates of aperiodic thickness could achieve an extraordinarily high Q factor for the resonator. This led them to the discovery that it was possible to construct a MASER operating at room temperature and in the earth's magnetic field. 

Link to The Royal Society article.   [2]