Ian A. Walmsley

Adjunct Professor of Optics
Professor of Physics, University of Oxford

E-mail: walmsley@physics.ox.ac.uk

Short Biography
Ian A. Walmsley received the B.Sc. degree with first class honors in Physics from Imperial College, University of London. His doctoral dissertation, at The Institute of Optics, concerned the quantum nature of spontaneous scattering. He received his Ph.D. in Optics from the University of Rochester in 1986. Following a brief period as a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University he joined The Institute of Optics in 1988 as an Assistant Professor, and currently holds the title of Adjunct Professor of Optics. He is also presently Professor of Physics at University of Oxford. He currently holds the Hooke Chair of Experimental Physics and is Head of Atomic and Laser Physics. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society, and a former National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator. He is Director at Large of the OSA (until 2008), a member of the Beirat of the Max Born Institute and the Physics Strategic Advisory Panel of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Professor Walmsley founded the Center for Quantum Information (CQI) at The Institue in 2001, and now leads the European Commission's Integrated Project Qubit Applications, a consortium of 35 institutions across the European Union working in the implementation of small scale quantum information processing applications.

Research
Professor Walmsley's research interests include the fundamental physics of short pulse lasers, particularly in the characterization of ultrashort optical pulses, new methods of ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy, and the interaction of radiation and matter on short time scales (including the potential for quantum and coherent control of matter and light for enhanced applications such as information processing and nanoscale technology).

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