Bill Lee is Professor of Ceramic Engineering, Director of the Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics (CASC) and Co-Director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London, UK. He is also Deputy Chair of the UK Government advisory Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) reporting directly to the Energy Minister.

Dr. Lee holds a First Class Honours BSc in Physical Metallurgy from Aston University and a DPhil in Radiation Damage in Ceramics from Oxford University, UK. From 1983-89 he was in the USA as a post doc at Case Western Reserve University and as an Assistant Professor in Ceramic Engineering at Ohio State University.  Returning to the UK he was at Sheffield University from 1989-2005. While there he was Director of the Sorby Centre for Electron Microscopy and the British Nuclear Fuels Limited university research alliance, the Immobilisation Science Laboratory.

He is co-author of 4 books and over 350 peer-reviewed publications; a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and a Fellow of the City and Guilds Institute. He is a winner of the IOMMM Rosenhain Medal (1999) and Pfeil Award (2000) and the Wakabayashi Prize of the Technical Association of Refractories, Japan (2004). He has been a member of the Basic Science Division for nearly 30 years, is a Fellow of The American Ceramic Society and a member of the Board of Directors.

His current research interests cover ceramics in nuclear applications including spent fuel durability, vitreous and glass composite wasteforms and ceramic fuels and structural components in Generation IV reactors, as well as non-oxide ultra-high temperature ceramics for aerospace applications.