David Keen is a research scientist at the ISIS Neutron Scattering Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire in the U.K. and a visiting professor at the Physics Department in Oxford University. He trained as a physicist at Kings College London University before completing a DPhil thesis in Oxford in 1990, “Determination of the structure of disordered materials by neutron scattering.”  He has continued in this field of research to understand how structural disorder impacts on the physical properties of materials, developing total scattering (or pair distribution function, PDF) experimental and reverse Monte Carlo computational methods to probe the local structural arrangements of condensed matter.  These might be small or large-scale deviations from long-range crystalline periodicity leading to local static or dynamic defects or in the extreme cases amorphization and even melting.  Recently he has been applying these techniques to a range of systems, including Perovskite-structured ceramics, thermoelectrics with the rock salt structure and metal organic frameworks that become amorphous when milled or heated.  He has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles and has recently summarized aspects of this work in a paper in Nature “The crystallography of correlated disorder.”