Neil is a Senior Lecturer in the Wolfson School’s world leading Rapid Manufacturing Research Group. His research focus is on powder based processes and materials to enable widespread industrial use of Rapid Manufacturing. To date he has secured over £2m of research cash funding from government and industry with further in-kind contributions from industry. His dissemination activities include over 30 academic journal papers, over 40 international conference papers, numerous magazine articles and television interviews.

Neil's career in research began as a Research Assistant in the Product Safety and Testing Group within the Institute for Occupational Ergonomics at Nottingham University. After 3 years he joined the Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Research Group at Nottingham University with an EPSRC Scholarship and sponsorship from 3D Systems to fund his PhD in Rapid Tooling. Upon completion of his PhD in 1999, Neil took up a lectureship at De Montfort University where he set up the world’s first MSc course in rapid product development.

Neil moved to Loughborough University in 2001 and in 2005 he was a Visiting Lecturer at University of Queensland in Australia. Neil is an elected member of the EPSRC Peer review college, a reviewer for other funding bodies such as the Hong Kong Government and is a regular reviewer for various academic journals. He is a member of the international Scientific Panel for the Texas based SFF Symposium and a member of technical panel for TCT UK Conference and the organising committee for the 1 st International Conference on Rapid Manufacturing. He has also been a session chair for the SFF Symposium ( Texas), ICMA ( Hong Kong) and TCT (UK). He represented the UK’s Rapid Prototyping in Manufacturing Association (RPMA) at the global summit of the Global Alliance of Rapid Prototyping Associations (GARPA) in Beijing in 2002 and has been an invited contributor the annual state of the industry reports for rapid technologies since 2001. He has been an invited speaker for numerous industry events and is the Lead editor of world’s first book on Rapid Manufacturing, published by Wiley.

Neil has UK and International patents pending on High Speed Sintering. His research on High Speed Sintering has been selected by EPSRC to be publicised as an exemplar for how IMRC funding is most effective. His research into selective sintering for personalised football boots culminated in the commercialisation of the world’s first ever fully personalised sports footwear.