Philip Withers is Professor at the Universities of Monash and Manchester, UK. He is the first Regius Professor of Materials, appointed by the Queen in 2016. He took a leading role in establishing the Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials being its Chief Scientist from its inauguration in 2016. It brings together 11 partners, universities and research organisations. He set up the Defence Centre of Excellence in Materials (DMEx) bringing together 25 catapults, universities and research organisations and bp’s $100m International Centre for Advanced Materials between the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge, Urbana Champaign and Imperial College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, Academia Europea. He is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Indian National Science Academy. With an H factor of >115 and over 60,000 citations, his work is world renowned. His research focusses on imaging, modelling and understanding the behaviour of materials in real time and 3D often in situ under demanding environments. He is a graduate of Cambridge University where he studied Physics (1985) before a PhD in Materials Science (1989). In 1990 he was appointed Assistant Lecturer at Cambridge before taking up his Chair in Manchester in 1998.