The University of Manchester, Turner Dental School was the first dental Institution to establish a Biomaterials Science Unit in the UK. The Unit has shown a continuous activity for over 40 years, which was highlited by the invention of acrylic bone cement and polycarboxylate cement. During the last 25 years more than 30 PhD students have been successfully supervised, whereas the Director of the Section is the current editor of the Dental Materials (Elsevier Science), the most prestigious periodical in the field.

The facilities of the Unit include: Fourier Transform Infrared spectrocopy unit, Universal testing machine, colour stability irradiance facility and Tristimulus instrument, glossmeter, shrinkage-stress kinetics, photo DSC, thermal expansion, HPLC, abrasion and wear machines. Facilities for the study of viscoelastic creep, packing stress dynamics, roughness, micro-hardness at low and high load, edge toughness, fracture toughness, and optical imaging analysis and access to liquid & solid state NMR, YAG Lasers, X-ray Spectrometer (XPS), electron microprobe and Inductive Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) are also available.

The Unit has generated an average of more than 12 publications annually, whereas more than 10 chapters and textbooks have been published during the past decade.