Ian Alexander Walmsley FRS is Provost of

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

where he is also Chair of Experimental Physics. He was previously pro-vice-chancellor for research and Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, and a professorial fellow at

St Hugh's College, Oxford St Hugh's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. It is located on a site on St Margaret's Road, to the north of the city centre. It was founded in 1886 by Elizabeth Wordsworth as a women's college, and acce ...

. He is also director of the NQIT (Networked Quantum Information Technologies) hub within the UK National Quantum Technology Programme, which is led by the University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America. Walmsley was educated at

, and The Institute of Optics,

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The University of ...

. He received the Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science in 2011 and was elected a fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

in 2012 for his contributions to

quantum optics Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons. Photons have ...

and ultrafast optics, including his development of the spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER) technique. In March 2018 it was announced that Walmsley had been appointed provost of

, succeeding James Stirling on 1 September 2018. In October 2019, Walmsley co-founde
ORCA Computing
to undertake

Quantum Computing Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though ...

Optical Fibre An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means t ...

through the use of

quantum memory In quantum computing, quantum memory is the quantum-mechanical version of ordinary computer memory. Whereas ordinary memory stores information as binary states (represented by "1"s and "0"s), quantum memory stores a quantum state for later re ...

References

External links

Ultrafast quantum optics and optical metrology
Research home page at Oxford Living people British physicists Provosts of Imperial College London Fellows of St Hugh's College, Oxford Statutory Professors of the University of Oxford Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Optical Society Alumni of Imperial College London University of Rochester alumni Optical physicists 1960 births {{ImperialCollege-stub