Dr. Amanda K. Petford-Long is Director of the Materials Science Division and an Argonne Distinguished Fellow. 

As Argonne Distinguished Fellow in the Materials Science Division, she participates in a BES-funded research program, and is currently leading the Argonne Microelectronics Institute. From January 2010 to February 2014, she was director of the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a U.S. Department of Energy national user facility at Argonne, focused on capabilities tailored to the creation and characterization of new functional materials on the nanoscale.

She holds a D.Phil in Materials Science from the University of Oxford (1985) and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from University College, London (1981). She moved to Argonne in 2005 from the University of Oxford where she was a full professor in the Materials Department and a tutorial fellow at Corpus Christi College.  

Dr. Petford-Long’s research interests include the dependence of magnetic, transport, and optical properties of layered ferroic films and nanostructures on microstructure and composition. She has been particularly involved in exploring  the physical properties of the nanomaterials, such as magnetic domain behavior  and transport behavior, using in situ transmission electron microscopy techniques including Lorentz microscopy.

She has published over 360 papers in the scientific literature. She is a Fellow  of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Materials Research Society, of the American Physical Society, and of the Royal Microscopical Society. She is also a full professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Northwestern University, where she is active in graduate education.