Prof Michael Gilchrist, PhD, DEng, FIMechE, FIEI, FIMMM, FInstP, is Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His leadership roles have included 7 years as Head of the UCD School of Mechanical & Materials Engineering (2011-18), and 3 years as VP for Research in UCD's College of Engineering, Mathematical & Physical Sciences (2009-11).
His teaching activities have variously spanned all undergraduate and postgraduate levels on topics related to materials science, materials processing, and engineering mechanics.
His research concerns the dynamic mechanical behaviour of non-linear materials, including both biological tissue and polymer materials. This has applications relevant to:
impact biomechanics of the human body,
forensic biomechanics & engineering,
the dynamic response of skin, bone, neural tissue,
micro-injection moulding of polymers, and
precision manufacturing processes for polymers.
Intellectual property from his research has been licensed to ten separate research groups and companies in Ireland, UK, Belgium, US, Canada and Singapore. He has been lead PI on in excess of €10m of competitively won research funding and two of his former students have established start-up technology companies. He currently holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Ottawa and has previously been a Visiting Professor at CNRS & ENSAM-Paris (2003-4). He has supervised some 50 research students (Masters, PhDs and Postdocs) to date and has published 200 peer reviewed journal articles. He is Ireland's representative to the General Assembly of IUTAM, the International Union for Theoretical & Applied Mechanics. He has received institutional and national awards for his teaching excellence, and various international Best Paper awards for his scholarly research.