David Cockayne

David John Hugh Cockayne FRS He was the president of the International Federation of Societies for Microscopy from 2003 till 2007, then vice-president 2007 to 2010.

Biography

Cockayne was born in Balham, London, the second of three children of John Henry Cockayne, policeman and later staff manager, and his wife, Ivy, née Hatton. In 1950, when he was 8, the family sailed from Tilbury on the Otranto, bound for Melbourne; their new home was to be in the Geelong area of Victoria. In 1952 they moved to a newly-built house in Geelong, and Cockayne attended a new school, from where he was awarded a scholarship to Geelong Grammar School in 1953, where he excelled in chemistry, physics and mathematics.

In 1961 Cockayne enrolled at the University of Melbourne to read physics; he graduated in 1964 with first-class honours. He went on to do research on electron diffraction for an MSc, again gaining a first in 1966. He was then awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to read for a DPhil at Magdalen College, Oxford.

David joined the Department of Metallurgy in Oxford in September 1966 to conduct research on electron microscope images of defects in crystal lattices, under the supervision of Dr M J Whelan. He was awarded a DPhil in 1970.

At the age of 32, Cockayne took up the post of director of the University of Sydney Electron Microscope Unit (EMU) in June 1974. He also held the position of associate professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1986, and then to a personal chair (Professor in Physics (Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis)) in 1992. He built up an important research base at Sydney; with David McKenzie he developed a high-precision electron diffraction technique within an electron microscope to study the structure of amorphous materials.

Cockrayne moved back to Oxford in 2000, to take up the post of Professor in the Physical Examination of Materials, at the Department of Materials. He also became Professorial Fellow at Linacre College. In the department of materials he “built up an outstanding electron microscopy group”, and followed up studies started in Sydney on the properties of nanometer-sized crystals (quantum dots) insemiconductor alloys. his certificate of election noted that he was: