Alan Cocks moved to Oxford in 2006 to take up the Statutory Chair of Materials Engineering and become Head of the Solid Mechanics and Engineering Group in the Department of Engineering Science. He is now a Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford. Prior to moving to Oxford he held academic positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA and at the Universities of Leicester and Cambridge in the UK.

In recent years there has been a growing trend in the use of variational techniques to model microstructure evolution, inelastic deformation and damage development in engineering materials. This talk will provide an overview of the background to their development, how they allow the competition of different kinetic processes to be examined and evaluated, and how they can be used to provide a framework for the development of numerical techniques and approximate and bounding methods.