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 accepte ...

. He is also director of the

NQIT NQIT (Networked Quantum Information Technologies) is a quantum computing research hub established in 2014 as part of the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. NQIT is a consortium of 9 UK universities and 30 partners, which received funding ...

(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 The Institute of Optics is a department and research center at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. The institute grants degrees at the bachelor's, master's and doctoral levels through the University of Rochester School of Enginee ...

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 Roc ...

. He received the

Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science The Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science is an award of the American Physical Society (APS) that was first awarded in 1998. It is named in honor of Joseph F. Keithley, the founder of Keithley Instruments. The award is prese ...

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 b ...

and

ultrafast optics In optics, an ultrashort pulse, also known as an ultrafast event, is an electromagnetic pulse whose time duration is of the order of a picosecond (10−12 second) or less. Such pulses have a broadband optical spectrum, and can be created by m ...

, including his development of the

spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction In ultrafast optics, spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER) is an ultrashort pulse measurement technique originally developed by Chris Iaconis and Ian Walmsley. The basics SPIDER is an interferometric ultr ...

(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 ...

in Optical Fibre 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 ...

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