John C. Travers

John C. Travers is Professor of Physics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and director of the Laboratory of Ultrafast Physics and Optics (LUPO). He creates new light sources with tailored, and often extreme, properties, and has made multiple significant contributions to ultrafast nonlinear optics. He is recognised as a pioneer of using gas-filled hollow waveguides for ultrafast frequency conversion, pulse compression and supercontinuum generation. He proposed and demonstrated the use of soliton dynamics in hollow capillaries to produce high-brightness tuneable few-femtosecond pulses across the vacuum and deep ultraviolet region: a foundational technology. The light sources John develops range from the very small—for advanced industrial applications in the semiconductor industry and healthcare—to very large installations for pushing the boundaries of fundamental science.

John received the M.Sci degree in Mathematics and Physics from Durham University, UK, in 2003 and the M.Sc and Ph.D degrees from Imperial College London (UK) in 2004 and 2008. For his Ph.D thesis he was awarded the European Physical Society’s Quantum Electronics Thesis Prize. He was an Imperial College Junior Research Fellow from 2009-2010, after which he moved to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany, as a research group leader. In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and established LUPO within the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Science at Heriot-Watt University, in 2016. He was promoted to full Professor of Physics in 2019.

In 2020 John was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant and elected Fellow of Optica (OSA). In 2022 John was awarded the IET A F Harvey Engineering Research Prize.

The outcomes of his research have been published in more than 250 publications, presented in over 100 invited talks, and received attention in a wide range of scientific news outlets.