Professor Alfonso Ngan is 125th Anniversary Chair, a Royal Society Wolfson Fellow, and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Birmingham. He obtained his B.Sc (Eng) degree from the University of Hong Kong in 1989 and his PhD from the University of Birmingham in 1992. After a year of postdoctoral training at Oxford University, he joined the University of Hong Kong in 1993, where he was promoted to Chair Professorship in 2011, and served as various administrative roles including department chair, associate dean of engineering, and interim vice-president. In March 2025, he returned to the University of Birmingham to become its first Anniversary Chair in the College of Science and Engineering. Professor Ngan’s interests include novel stimuli-responsive materials, material defects and their modelling, and nanomechanics, including applications to biological systems. His main contributions include a method for correcting viscoelastic effects in nanoindentation measurements of soft materials, an understanding of stochastic deformation behaviour in small crystals, an exact formalism of continuous dislocation kinematics, and the discovery of a novel class of metal hydroxides/oxides as stimuli-responsive actuating materials. His research-related honours include the Rosenhain Medal from the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, UK (2007), a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship (2009), Changjiang Professorship from the Chinese Ministry of Education (2019), and Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Prize of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (2020). He is an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering. He serves as a Trustee of the Croucher Foundation and an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Plasticity.