Professor Peter D. Lee joined Imperial College in 1994 after completing his D.Phil. in Materials Science from the University of Oxford. He remained in the department, as the Professor in the area of Metals, until 2011, when he moved to become co-Director of the Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility (MXIF) at Diamond. He has remained as a visiting Professor in the department to support his group of 9 PhD students co-supervised at Imperial College.

Prof. Lee has worked in the area of solidification and imaging of alloys for over 25 years, both in academia and industry. Working in Industry, as a Research Scientist at Alcan International's Kingston R&D Laboratory,he helped establish their Modelling of Shape Castings Programme, both developing analysis software and applying it to the design of many automotive castings. He is Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and the Institute of Cast Metals Engineers. He holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and M.A.Sc. in Materials from the University of Toronto, with his undergraduate and master's thesis focussing on the simulation of ferrous metallurgical processes.

Professor Lee's group includes 8 PDRA's at MXIF, and  14 PhD students at Manchester and Imperial. The group is developing new computational and experimental techniques to better understanding microstructure evolution. He has supervised over 40 PhD students and 30 PDRA’s. Many of these researchers are now leading academics (at universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Lille, Leicester, NTU-Singapore) and industrialists (at companies including Alcoa, Rolls-Royce, Shell, Ford and Johnson & Matthey).

Professor Lee has published over 140 journal articles and been the Keynote or Invited Speaker at over 50 international conferences, including the Science of Metals Processing Symposium, Delft, 2010; the Gordon Conf. on ICME 2009 and the Modelling of Casting, Welding and Advanced Solidification Processing, 2009, and he has been Chair of the Technical Committee for many International Conferences. The open source software Prof. Lee and group developed to predict defects in castings, μMatIC, is used by many companies worldwide to help develop new components for more energy efficient transport and gas turbine design.  For example, Ford use this software are part of their “Atoms to Engines” project to produce better castings.