Peter Haynes to take over Provost role in October

Professor Peter Haynes has been appointed as the new Provost and Deputy President of Imperial College. The current  Vice-Provost for Education and Student Experience, Haynes will succeed the outgoing Provost, Professor Ian Walmsley, who has served in the role since 2018. Imperial President Hugh Brady said Professors Haynes and Walmsley were already working jointly to ensure a “smooth transition”, before the start of Haynes’s tenure on 1st October. He saluted Haynes’s “superb mix of academic and leadership experience”.

The Provost is the highest academic officer of the College, charged with upholding its academic standards by working directly with the Faculty Deans. The library, admissions and student services all answer to the Office of the Provost, which operates separately from that of the President. Walmsley, himself a celebrated researcher in quantum computing and a fellow of the Royal Society, had championed initiatives aimed at democratising science during his seven-year tenure, including the Provost’s Visiting Professors programme.

Haynes read Physics at the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently obtained a PhD and became a Research Fellow. He held several fellowship roles before joining Imperial College in 2007, where from 2012 he held the professorship of Theory and Simulation of Materials.

His work at Imperial has focused on methods for large-scale first-principle simulations of materials, where the computational effort scales linearly with the size of the system. In recognition this work, he was awarded the 2010 James Clerk Maxwell Prize. Haynes was more recently elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and became Vice-Provost in 2022.