Chris Cheeseman joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London in 1990, initially working with Professor Roger Perry. This followed periods in industry with Redland Technology, Morgan Materials Technology and Morgan Matroc. He has a DPhil from Oxford University (high temperature properties of ceramics) and BSc in Physics and Materials Science from the University of Warwick.

Chris is Professor of Materials Resources Engineering and the leader of a major research group working on the beneficial reuse of waste materials and resource efficiency within the Environmental and Water Resource Engineering (EWRE) Section. He is also the Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Sustainable Civil Engineering.

The focus of his research is on sustainable use of materials, waste management and resource efficiency. This is a key area to achieve more sustainable development and provides significant opportunities for innovation. The emphasis of waste management research has changed from safe disposal to the beneficial reuse of materials and wastes as resources. This type of interdisciplinary research falls between the more traditional fields of environmental engineering, materials processing, waste recycling and civil engineering and involves collaboration with both industry and other researchers at Imperial and beyond.

Chris was formerly the Director of the PhD Research Programme and Postgraduate Tutor in the Department. He was also the Senior Scientific Advisor for Novacem, a spin-out company developed in collaboration with IC Innovations that was formed in July 2007 to develop novel MgO containing binders that set by adsorbing CO₂.