Colm is the founder and head of the Applied Nanoscience and Nanoscale Engineering research group at the Department of Engineering’s Nanoscience Centre.

Originally from Dublin, he obtained his primary degree in Physics from Trinity College Dublin where he was also a Trinity College Foundation scholar, and the recipient of the Fitzgerald medal in 1992.  He obtained his PhD in Physics, also from Trinity College, on the topic of Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy (SNOM).  After a period of postdoctoral research at Konstanz University, Germany, Colm came to work in Cambridge in 1997 when he joined Professor Mark Welland's group. 

Colm has been a Reader in Nanoscale Engineering since 2010 and is co-founder of spin-out company CambridgeNano.  He is on the editorial board of the journals Ultramicroscopy and Microscopy & Imaging and was elected to a fellowship of the Institute of Physics in 2009.

He said: “I am very honoured to have been elected to this Fellowship, as this is the world's largest professional engineering institution.“

Colm’s research areas include ferroelectrics, ferromagnetics and electronics at the nanoscale. His work spans from the fundamental science underpinning nanotechnology to highly applied research.  His primary focus at the moment is in applying his techniques to (i) enhance oil recovery in a major collaboration with BP, and (ii) better understand the effect of personal health products on the molecular structure of hair and skin in a collaboration with Unilever