Reece Oosterbeek BE ME PhD MIMMM AFHEA

Reece is an Associate Professor of Engineering Science, and a member of the Solid Mechanics and Materials Engineering Group. His research spans a broad range of challenges across metamaterials and additive manufacturing for medical and sustainability applications. He is also a Tutorial Fellow at Lincoln College, where he teaches a range of topics across mechanics and materials.

Prior to joining Oxford he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Imperial College London, working on additively manufactured metallic lattice materials for orthopaedic implants. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, and Trinity College) thanks to a Woolf Fisher Scholarship (NZ), focusing on bioresorbable polymer-glass composites for cardiac stents. Originally from New Zealand, he obtained BE(Hons) and ME degrees in Chemical and Materials Engineering from the University of Auckland.

Reece’s research focuses on how the properties of materials evolve over long timescales, in applications such as biodegradable materials, and fatigue loading of medical implants. He is particularly interested in using additive manufacturing to design and build structures and materials with controllable time-dependent behaviour. His research is also directed towards polymer sustainability, including biodegradable polymers, and methods of improving polymer recycling using AI-informed workflows and advanced materials testing. The main research themes in Reece’s research group are:

Metamaterials for medicine

Designing, manufacturing, and testing new metamaterials for medical devices, using polymers, composites, and metals. We look to control not just mechanical properties, but how properties evolve over time in response to phenomena such as material degradation, drug release, and mechanical fatigue.

Mechanics of metamaterials

Additive manufacturing offers enormous possibilities to produce metamaterials with unusual and exceptional mechanical behaviour, including energy absorbing, shape changing, and tunable stiffness materials. We aim to develop novel architectures for mechanical metamaterials based on design and material processing, and understand and predict their properties through multiscale modelling approaches.

Polymer biodegradation and recycling

Polymers are incredibly useful as engineering materials in applications as diverse as medical implants, packaging, and automotive components. Their usage has significant sustainability implications however, including usage of fossil fuels and accumulation of microplastic waste. Our work here includes optimising the bioresorption of medical polymers, and development of AI-enabled workflows for polymer upcycling into high-performance applications.

Below is a list of suggested projects, this is not exhaustive so if you have another project in mind or would like to explore potential projects, please contact me. These projects do not have guaranteed funding; fully-funded projects are advertised separately here and on the departmental Research Studentships page.

• AI techniques for rapid prediction and qualification of recycled polymer blends. A key barrier to increased recycling and reduction of polymer waste is the unpredictability and degradation of polymer properties during recycling from varied and low-quality waste streams. This project will develop AI-based workflows, making use of 3D printing, polymer processing, and advanced materials testing (MT2.0) to generate large and rich datasets. These models will predict the properties of recycled polymer formulations from minimal input data, accelerating materials qualification and manufacturing. Industrial collaborators from the plastics industry will provide additional guidance and supervision
• Experimental and multiscale modelling approaches to the mechanics and degradation of additively manufactured foams. Incorporation of gas-releasing foaming agents in 3D printing enables tuning of material density across a component. This project will develop filament- and/or powder-based additive manufacturing methods for foaming materials, focusing on biodegradable polymers. The behaviour of printed foam structures, including hierarchical porosity, functional gradients, and metamaterial structures will be explored in terms of material mechanics, including both experimental investigation and multi-scale modelling, as well as long-term biodegradation
• Machine learning-based optimisation of powder bed fusion process parameters for bioresorbable composites. Powder bed fusion (PBF) is a 3D printing technique that enables production of highly intricate and detailed structures such as mechanical metamaterial lattices. Such systems are often optimised for a small set of materials like Nylon, rather than the variety of bioresorbable materials used for biodegradable medical implants. This project will develop models, using AI or heuristic material-property based algorithms, to rapidly optimise printing parameters for new combinations of bioresorbable composite materials, enabling rapid tuning of device properties such as drug release, degradation, and mechanics.
• Fatigue and degradation in bioresorbable lattice materials. Porous, structured, lattice materials made from biodegradable materials are of interest for temporary medical implants. This project will investigate the mechanics of fatigue in lattice materials, the interaction of this process with long-term material degradation, and methods for improving fatigue life through structural/material design. This will involve both experimental work and development of theoretical modelling approaches.
• A 3D printed, bioresorbable osteotomy wedge. Osteotomy is a surgical procedure used to correct the mechanical axis of a joint and prevent osteoarthritis. Currently bone grafts are often used to fill this space and provide mechanical support, however a synthetic, bioresorbable replacement would be highly advantageous. This project will take advantage of powder bed fusion (PBF) capabilities and newly developed bioresorbable polymers, to develop a suitable prototype device, considering mechanical support and long-term degradation. A collaborating orthopaedic surgeon will provide additional supervision and clinical advice.
• Mass transport under mechanical load in bioresorbable particulate composites. The transport of fluids including water or soluble active agents (e.g. drugs) through a material is essential to the time dependent behaviour of composite materials, including controlled release and bioresorption. Despite this the factors that govern mass transport in particulate composites (diffusion, interfacial wicking, component hydrophilicity) are not well understood. This project will use experimental and modelling approaches to understand the mass transport behaviour of polymer-ceramic particulate composites, and the influence of external loading on this process.