Career
Cahn left Cambridge in 1947 to take up a research post at Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment with a salary that enabled him to get married. He completed his doctoral research without supervision, Orowan rarely wrote up the work of his doctoral students and Cahn finally wrote it up alone in 1949. At Harwell, Robert continued his researches into the process of "deformation twinning" Crystal twinning where he demonstrated a new type of twinning in uranium crystals. However, as the only person undertaking fundamental research,at Harwell, Cahn felt isolated and in 1951 he moved to Birmingham to the Department of his father in law, Daniel Hanson. Here he supervised research students concentrating on twinning, intermetallics and the formation of crystal nuclei during recrystallisation. These themes remained the centre of Cahn’s attention for the remainder of his academic life.
Following a sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore in 1954, he turned down a professorship at Liverpool on the promise of a professorship in Birmingham that never materialised. Cahn moved to a professorship at Bangor in 1962. However the centre of interest of the department, semiconductors, left little room for Cahn’s main interests.
Therefore in 1965 Cahn moved to the University of Sussex to become the first Professor of Materials Science in Britain, developing the country’s first courses in materials science. Under his leadership, the Department managed to attract excellent staff and research funding and undertake a wide range of well respected research, in particular on metallic glasses and rapid cooling. At this time Cahn both developed his scientific editing and became President of the Materials Science Club.
In 1981-2 the Department at Sussex was the victim of severe cutbacks in the university sector, and the Materials Science Department, with an excellent research reputation but with a small number of undergraduates (due to the unconventional nature of the subject), was earmarked for closure. Cahn took early retirement and went for two stressful years to the University of Paris, Orsay, returning to retirement in Cambridge in 1983. It was in that same year that he was awarded the A. A. Griffith Medal and Prize. He remained there until his death in 2007, from 1986 as an Honorary Research Fellow in Cambridge’s Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science . Apart from one year spent in the US in 1985-6, Cahn’s main output in these final years was his editing work.
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