Professor John Travers FRSE

Professor of Physics and Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, Heriot-Watt University

John Travers is a physicist working at the frontier of ultrafast light. He received his PhD from Imperial College London in 2008 and was appointed Professor of Physics at Heriot-Watt University in 2019. As Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, he directs the Laboratory of Ultrafast Physics and Optics, where his group creates new light sources with extreme properties — from extremely short laser pulses and optical attosecond waveforms across the far ultraviolet, to broadband supercontinuum generation. His pioneering use of soliton dynamics in gas-filled hollow fibres has opened new routes to tuneable ultraviolet light sources with applications in fundamental science, advanced manufacturing, and the semiconductor industry.

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