Rupert Oulton is a Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, and Deputy Head of the Department of Physics. Having studied for a PhD in Physics at Imperial, he moved to UC Berkeley to research Nanophotonics in the group of Xiang Zhang. Here, he demonstrated some of the first lasers smaller than the diffraction limit of light using plasmonics to create tightly localized optical fields. Returning to Imperial after 5 years in California, Prof Oulton won a prestigious EPSRC Fellowship and Leverhulme Lectureship. Prof Oulton’s research now focusses on the physics and engineering of light matter interactions using nanophotonics with applications in quantum optics, photo catalysis and nonlinear optics.

Carole Perry obtained her undergraduate and DPhil research degrees in chemistry from the University of Oxford, UK where she also held an independent junior research fellowship. She has held permanent academic positions at Brunel University and Nottingham Trent University where she is currently a distinguished research professor. She has held fellowships/ visiting professorships in Israel (Weizmann Institute), France (Université Pierre et Marie Curie), Germany (KIT) and USA (Suny, Buffalo and Radcliffe Institute, Harvard). Her research interests lie at the interface between biology, chemistry and physics.

Ian White was educated at the Belfast Royal Academy and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he gained his BA and PhD degrees in 1980 and 1984.[6] He was then appointed a research fellow and assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge before becoming professor of physics at the University of Bath in 1990. In 1996 he moved to the University of Bristol and became head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 1998, before returning to the University of Cambridge in October 2001.

While in Cambridge he served in the roles of master of Jesus College, head of the School of Technology, and pro-vice-chancellor for institutional affairs. He was a key member of the UK-China Global Issues Dialogue Centre at Cambridge, which was funded by Huawei and active in the 2010s. Critics attributed White’s involvement with the centre as a contributing factor to Cambridge’s silence over the Chinese government’s increasing encroachment on academic freedom in the late 2010s.[7][8]

In 2018, White retired from the mastership of Jesus College to become vice-chancellor of the University of Bath. He accepted a salary that was about half of his predecessor’s, a move praised by student and staff unions as a positive development in tackling excessive pay gaps in academia.[9]