Professor David John Hugh Cockayne, FRS, FInstPhys, (19 March 1942 - 22 December 2010) was a professor in the materials science department

Department of Materials, University of Oxford

The Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England was founded in the 1950s as the Department of Metallurgy, by William Hume-Rothery, who was a reader in Oxford's Department of Inorganic Chemistry....

 of the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

.. He was an electron microscopist who played an important role in the development of weak-beam transmission electron microscopy

Transmission electron microscopy

Transmission electron microscopy is a microscopy technique whereby a beam of electrons is transmitted through an ultra thin specimen, interacting with the specimen as it passes through...

 (TEM), and in the application of high resolution TEM to diamond

Diamond

In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...

, fullerenes and semiconductors.

David Cockayne was a Fellow of the Royal Society

Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

 (1997) and the Institute of Physics

Institute of Physics

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of around 40,000....

.

External links

• http://www.materials.ox.ac.uk/peoplepages/cockayne.html
• Guardian obituary 2 March 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/02/david-cockayne-obituary