Nicole Church
MA (Cantab), MSci (Cantab), PhD (Cantab)
College roles
Fellow (A)
College Lecturer in Natural Sciences
Director of Studies in Natural Sciences Part IB; II; III (Materials Science)
Postgraduate Mentor
University roles
Assistant Professorship in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy
Biography
Dr Nicole Church studied Natural Sciences at Newnham College in the University of Cambridge, specialising in Materials Science and Metallurgy. She was awarded the IOM3 prize, recognising her achievement in her final year research project on titanium alloys. Nicole completed her doctoral studies in 2023 at the same institution under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Jones. Her research developed a new theory governing the behaviour of transforming alloys, providing for the first time a mechanistic understanding of these materials with applications in the aerospace sector. Nicole was then appointed as a post-doctoral research associate, within the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre (UTC), investigating novel alloy systems for high temperature structural applications. In addition, she also studied the relaxation of residual stresses inTi-6Al-4V joined using solid state welding processes.
Nicole currently lectures the Fracture and Fatigue course in Materials Science Part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos.
Nicole was the Beatrice Mary Dale Sciences Research Fellow at Newnham College, hosted within the Rolls-Royce UTC in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy.
Research Interests
Nicole has a research focus on exploiting the reversible shape-memory and superelastic behaviour exhibited by certain classes of titanium alloys, with applications in the biomedical sector for orthopaedic and orthodontic implant applications. These alloys possess biomimetic properties and can sustain large, recoverable elastic strains. However, they suffer from a form of functional fatigue whereby the useful properties diminish with repeated mechanical cycling. She aims to develop novel high resolution characterisation techniques to probe the mechanisms by which this functional fatigue accumulates, which should facilitate both compositional and thermo-mechanical processing optimisation to design new alloys that do not suffer from this in-service property degradation.
