Peter Knight (scientist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Knight is professor of Quantum Optics and Principal of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College. He was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours List of 2005.
His work is concerned principally with theoretical quantum optics, strong field physics and especially quantum information science. According to Thomson-ISI he is the most frequently cited AMO (Atomic Molecular and Optical) theorist in the world.
He received his first degree and his doctorate from Sussex University and became Research Associate at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Rochester and at the Physics Department and SLAC, Stanford University, USA. He was then SRC Research Fellow at Sussex University, and later Visiting Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
In 1976 he became Jubilee Research Fellow from 1976-1978 at Royal Holloway College, London University, followed by an SERC Advanced Fellowship from 1978-1983, first at RHC from 1978 to 1979, transferring in 1979 to Imperial College. He has remained ever since at Imperial College (apart from very frequent visits to the USA), first as a Lecturer 1983-1987, then Reader 1987-1988 and Professor since 1988.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, a Humboldt Research Award holder at the University of Konstanz and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of Rochester. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Optical Society of America and of the Royal Society. He is a newly elected member of Council of the Royal Society.
