Professor Miles Padgett OBE FRS

Miles Padgett is a Royal Society Research Professor and also holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He leads an optics research team covering a wide spectrum from blue-sky research to applied commercial development, funded by a combination of government, charity and industry.

His research team, covers all things optical from the basic ways in which light behaves as it pushes and twists the world around us, to the application of new optical techniques in imaging and sensing systems. 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 and new ways of imaging in 3D. He has won a number of national and international prizes including, in 2019, the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. The team's papers and article level metrics are found here.  He is currently the Principal Investigator of QuantIC, the UK's Centre of excellence for research, development and innovation in quantum enhanced imaging, bringing together eight Universities with more than 40 industry partners.

During his 5-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. He is now the academic co-lead of Glasgow's  Lab for Academic Culture.

Miles celebrates the academic and post-academic careers of his former group members, the most recent of which are featured  here.  

Awards

  • Rumford Medal

    For world leading research on optical orbital momentum including an angular form of the Einstein-Padolsky-Rosen paradox.

Professor Miles Padgett OBE FRS
Elected 2014