Philip Russell

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Philip Russell is the Director of the third division at the Max Planck Research Group at the Institute of Optics, Information and Photonics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His area of research is "photonics and new materials". It covers the examination of new optical materials, especially of photonic crystal fibers, in general the field of nano- and micro-structured photonic materials.

Russel obtained his DPhil in 1979 at the University of Oxford, where he was working on volume holography. From 1978 he was a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. In 1982 he moved to the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. There he startet his works on photonic crystal fibers. In 1986 he joined the fiber optics group at the University of Southampton. In 1996 he moved to the University of Bath, since then having built up the PMMG. He headed the Photonics and Photonic Materials Group at the University of Bath until 2005, then joining the Max Planck Research Group at the Institute of Optics, Information and Photonics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the founding chair of the OSA Topical Meeting Series on Bragg Gratings, Photosensitivity and Poling in Glass. In 2000 he won OSA's Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize for the invention of photonic crystal ("holey") fibre, which he first proposed in 1991. This was followed in 2002 by the Applied Optics Division Prize of the UK Institute of Physics. He is currently a LEOS Distinguished Lecturer and the recipient of a Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Award. In 2004 he won the Thomas Young Prize of the Institute of Physics. He is the founder of BlazePhotonics Limited, a company whose aim was the commercial exploitation of photonic crystal fibre. The company, which holds the world record for low loss hollow core photonic crystal fibre, was acquired by Crystal Fibre a/s in August 2004.