David Pettifor

David Godfrey Pettifor CBE FRS (9 March 1945 – 16 October 2017) was the Isaac Wolfson Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2011. He was also a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

He was the author of a book entitled Bonding and Structure of Molecules and Solids (Oxford University Press). He created "structure maps" which determine which crystal structure an alloy will form. He was a world authority on materials modelling and helped established the Oxford Materials Modelling Laboratory.

He held a BSc from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, supervised by Volker Heine.

He was made a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2005. In 1999, he received the Royal Society Armourers and Brasiers' Medal. Other awards include the William Hume-Rothery Award and the Hume-Rothery Prize.

He died on 16 October 2017.