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Jeremy Karl Cockcroft was educated at Lord Williams' Grammar School in Thame, Oxfordshire. In 1977, he won a scholarship to St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, where he read for a degree in Chemistry and obtained a 1st class BA honours degree. The research project for the Part II examination was supervised by Dr. Brian Fender. In addition, he took quantum chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical pharmacology as supplementary subjects, obtaining a distinction in the latter.
This was followed by a DPhil at Oxford University, again under the supervision of Dr. Brian Fender, but with the experimental research being carried out at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France. The research involved the use of powder neutron diffraction to study phase-transitions and orientational disorder in hexafluorophosphates.
He was then fortunate to be offered a research position in the group of Prof. Arndt Simon at the Max Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung, Stuttgart, Germany, to carry out neutron diffraction experiments of interest to the group. It was at this time that he became involved in the powder diffraction of magnetically-ordered materials.
Following marriage in 1989, he and his Chinese wife decided to return to the United Kingdom. In 1991 he was offered a temporary position by Prof. Judith Howard in the Department of Chemistry, Durham University. One year later he was offered a permanent lectureship in the Department of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London, where he now works closely with Prof. Paul Barnes as a member of the Industrial Materials Group.
He has taught symmetry and powder diffraction on the MSc Crystallography course for several years. Together with Dr. Huub Driessen, he has developed the symmetry course material for the Advanced Certificate in Protein Crystallography on the Web. More recently, he has been involved in setting up an Advanced Certificate in Powder Diffraction on the Web. This hypertext book results from the development of symmetry material for these two taught courses.
He is actively involved in many research projects that involve experimental and computational powder diffraction, both in the laboratory and at central facilities. Many of the research projects have strong industrial support. He has recently set up a powder diffractometer in the laboratory for low-temperature work and is heavily involved in the CCP14 project at Daresbury.
Comments on the contents of the CD-ROM are welcome and may be emailed to j.k.cockcroft@ucl.ac.uk.