Spatial transformations: from fundamentals to applications

Yang Hao is Professor of Antennas and Electromagnetics at Queen Mary University of London. He currently leads a £4.6M EPSRC QUEST programme grant on transformation electromagnetics and microwave metamaterials. He is a management board member of Cambridge Graphene Center. Over the years, he developed several fully-integrated antenna solutions based on novel artificial materials to reduce mutual RF interference, weight, cost and system complexity for security, aerospace and healthcare. He coined the term ‘Body-centric wireless communications’, i.e. networking among wearable and implantable wireless sensors on the human body. Professor Hao is a strategic advisory board member for Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), where he is committed to championing RF/microwave engineering for reshaping the future of UK manufacturing and electronics. Professor Hao is an Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. He received BAE Chairman’s Silver Award and is a holder of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Professor Hao is an elected Fellow of the ERA Foundation, IET and IEEE.

Professor John Roy Sambles FRS, studied Physics at Imperial College London, obtaining a first class honours degree in 1967 and a PhD in solid state physics in 1970. In 2002 he was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society for his contribution to a broad range of research on the fundamentals of melting, spin waves in metals, molecular rectification, liquid crystal optics and plasmonics. He has supervised 75 PhD students and published over 500 papers in international journals. Latest among several awards has been the Faraday medal of the Institute of Physics in 2012.

At Exeter he leads the Electromagnetic and Acoustic Materials research team, exploring the response of electromagnetic and acoustic Metamaterials, and is also Director of the large EPSRC funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Electromagnetic Metamaterials, which commenced in April 2014. He is currently President Elect of the Institute of Physics.

Alastair Paul Hibbins was born in Somerset, United Kingdom in 1975. He received both BSc and PhD degrees in Physics from the University of Exeter, UK in 1996 and 2000 respectively. His PhD research work considered grating coupling of surface plasmon polaritons at visible and microwave frequencies. He continued to undertake microwave studies of photonic structures as a member of the same research group for a further four years. In October 2004 he was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship with the aim of modelling the electromagnetic response of, building, and characterising a wide range of photonic microstructured devices for use at microwave frequencies. He was appointed as a Lecturer at the University of Exeter in April 2007, and promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. He now has a group of research staff and students working on microwave and acoustic metamaterials, and is co-director of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training in Metamaterials at Exeter.

Dr Thomas Philbin studies classical and quantum light in media, and also the general problem of dissipation in quantum systems. Specific topics include macroscopic quantum electrodynamics, the Casimir effect, transformation optics and Hawking radiation in laboratory systems.

Rob Foster is currently the QUEST Research Programme Manager and Researcher in the Antennas Research group, part of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary College, University of London, London, U.K. He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham. His current research interests include metamaterials, nano-composite materials, absorbers, material characterisation, transformation electromagnetics, body-centric wireless communications, wireless sensors, low-power systems, UWB systems, millimetre-wave systems, automotive radar, RF-based positioning systems, RFID, adaptive antennas, cognitive radio, smart homes, and the Internet of Things. He has authored or co-authored a number of conference and journal papers, including contributions in Proceedings of the IEEE and IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. He co-organised the 2012 European School of Antennas short course "Transformation Electromagnetics for Antenna Design" and the 2012 IET Seminar on Transformation Optics. He is on the organising committee for IMWS-Bio 2014, held in December 2014 as part of the IEEE International Microwave Workshop Series on RF and Wireless Technologies for Biomedical and Healthcare Applications.

Professor Patrick Grant FREng holds the Vesuvius Chair of Materials at Oxford University. His research takes place at the interface between advanced materials and manufacturing, with particular focus on energy storage, electrical and magnetic composites and advanced alloys for extreme environments. A key focus is the use of novel processes to control microstructure for improved engineering performance. He was one of the founding academics of the Begbroke Science Park at Oxford University and is currently Associate Head of Innovation for the Maths, Physical and Life Sciences Division. He served on the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise panel for Materials and the RCUK Fusion Advisory Board 2007-12; he wrote evidence paper New and Advanced Materials for UK government report Future of Manufacturing (2013) and is on EPSRC’s Manufacturing the Future Strategic Advisory Team. He is a member of Rolls-Royce’s Materials, Manufacture and Structures Advisory Board and Constellium’s Scientific Council.