CQUniversity's Professor Richard Clegg recently returned from the Fourth International Conference on Engineering Failure Analysis.

Professor Clegg, Director of the Process Engineering and Light Metals Centre in Gladstone, is the Editor in Chief of the journal, Engineering Failure Analysis, and was co-chair of the conference, with Colin Gagg from the Open University in the UK.

Professor Clegg - back from co-chairing a successful conference in UK

The conference held at Churchill College in Cambridge from July 4-7 was proclaimed a great success, with over 180 delegates from all over the globe. 

"I was very pleased with the conference, vindicating months of hard work and late night Skype calls with Colin in the UK," Professor Clegg said. 

"My favourite moment in the conference was when one of our keynote speakers, Rob Gray (an English barrister), 'cross examined' Colin about a paper he wrote on counterfeit coins in the UK.

"Rob was demonstrating the tricks barristers used to unsettle expert witnesses, and his talk was very entertaining and uncomfortable viewing for those of us who act as experts in Court."

Selected papers from the conference will be published in Engineering Failure Analysis, which has also had a good year.

The 2010 Impact Factor for EFA has more than doubled on the 2009 Impact Factor to 0.945, reflecting the improved prestige and reputation for the journal.  The journal is predominantly a practical, case studies based journal with excellent industrial applicability, and it is pleasing that the Impact Factor is now comparable to leading journals in related fields of a more purely academic nature.

Although final approval is needed from the Elsevier, the publisher of EFA and conference organiser, it is anticipated that the next conference will be in Amsterdam in 2012, and Richard will also be co-chair of that conference.