Professor Miles Padgett

EPSRC Interim Executive Chair

Professor Miles Padgett FRS is Interim Executive Chair at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Council.

Miles Padgett is a Royal Society Research Professor and holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

His research team covers all things optical from the basic ways light pushes and twists the world around us, to new techniques in imaging and sensing.

They are currently using the classical and quantum properties of light to explore:

  • the laws of quantum physics in accelerating frames
  • microscopes that see through noise
  • shaped-light that overcomes diffraction-limited resolution
  • endoscopes the width of a human hair

He is the Principal Investigator of QuantIC, the UK’s Centre for quantum enhanced imaging, bringing together eight universities with more than 40 industry partners.

Miles is a Fellow both of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society. He has won a number of national and international prizes including, in 2019, the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society and in 2021 the Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize of the European Physical Society.

Since 2019 he has been identified by Web of Science as a highly-cited researcher.

During his five-year term as Vice-Principal for Research he and his colleagues championed how an improved research culture was not an alternative to excellence but rather what would allow more of us to excel.

Last updated: 4 September 2023

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