Alan Windle’s research career has spanned Metallurgy, Polymers and Nanotechnology. He holds the Chair of Materials Science at Cambridge University, and leads a research group which has carbon nanotubes as its major theme. He was awarded the Bessemer Medal and the Royal Society of Arts Silver Medal in 1963, the Rosenhain Medal in 1987, the Swinburne Medal and Prize in 1992, the Founders Prize of the UK Polymer Physics group in 2006 and the Royal Society’s Armourers and Brasiers Medal in 2007.  He was elected to the Royal Society in 1997. He was closely involved in the founding of Cambridge Molecular Design, a materials software company, and of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis at Cambridge. He was Executive Director of the Cambridge-MIT Institute during its formative years, and is currently a Commissioner for the Royal Commission for the 1851 Exhibition, the Director of the Pfizer Institute for Pharmaceutical Materials Science and the Chairman of the Board of Q-Flo, a company designed to exploit innovations in materials nanotechnology. He has published some 300 papers in the areas of polymer physics, liquid crystalline polymers, computational modelling and carbon nanotubes.