Professor Miles Padgett OBE FRS FRSE FOSA FSPIE

Miles Padgett is a Royal Society Research Professor and also holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy in the School of Physics and Astronomy 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. 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 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.

Miles is a Fellow both of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society, in addition to various subject specific societies. He has won a number of national and international prizes including the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 2019.

For the UK REF 2021 exercise, the national assessment of research, he is the Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Panel.