Professor Martin Dawson FRS

Martin Dawson is a physicist and technologist who has made wide-ranging contributions to the development, application and market introduction of semiconductor-based photonic and optoelectronic technologies. He is Director of Research at the University of Strathclyde's Institute of Photonics and he is the Head and Scientific Director of the UK's first Fraunhofer research centre.

Martin is an internationally acknowledged pioneer of micro-LEDs, a compound semiconductor technology of major interest worldwide for new forms of versatile and high-performance electronic visual displays. He has made broad and foresighted contributions to photonics based on single crystal diamond and demonstrated diamond's unique characteristics for optical devices including micro-optics and lasers. He has made notable contributions to the development of high-power and high-brightness optically-pumped semiconductor lasers, making extensive demonstrations of their exquisite performance as tuneable sources for spectroscopy and nonlinear optics.

Martin's work has been recognised by the Nick Holonyak Jr Award from Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America), the Global Solid State Lighting Award of Outstanding Achievement from the International Solid State Lighting Alliance, the Aron Kressel Award of the IEEE Photonics Society and the Gabor Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics.

Professional position

  • Professor, Institute of Photonics, University of Strathclyde

Subject groups

  • Engineering

    Communications incl information theory, Engineering, electronics, Instrumentation, Materials science (incl materials engineering), Engineering, semiconductors