Title:  ‘An Endoscope the thickness of a single human hair’ by Prof. Miles Padgett

Summary:  How we use holography, a digital projector, graphics cards, and a lot of physics to create a new type of endoscope the thickness of a human hair.  Our endoscope can reach the places that other endoscopes cannot.

Speaker:  Miles Padgett is a Royal Society Research Professor of Optics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. He has held the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy since 2011 and served as Vice Principal for research at Glasgow from 2014 to 2020.   He was educated at the University of Manchester, the University of York, the University of St Andrews, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in 1988.

Working with Les Allen, he conducted pioneering work on optical angular momentum, for which they were awarded 2009 the Young Medal. The research group he leads is best known for its work on the fundamental properties of light's angular momentum, including optical tweezers and optical spanners the use of orbital angular momentum states to extend the alphabet of optical communication (with both classical and quantum light). Miles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2001, in 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society and in 2012 a Fellow of the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) – the UK's National Academy of Science.