Philip Russell (physicist)

Philip St. John Russell, FRS, (born March 25, 1953, in Belfast) is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. His area of research is "photonics and new materials". It covers the examination of new optical materials, especially of photonic crystal fibres, and more generally the field of nano- and micro-structured photonic materials.

Russell 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. In 1986 he joined the fiber optics group at the University of Southampton and began to work on the realisation of his idea of photonic crystal fibres, which were first demonstrated practically in 1996. Between 1996 and 2005, Russell worked at the University of Bath, and during his time there built up and led the Photonics and Photonic Materials Group (PPMG). Thereafter he joined the Max Planck Research Group at the Institute of Optics, Information and Photonics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, which then turned into the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light.

Russell is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America 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, and in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. 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. In September 2005 he received the Körber European Science Prize from the Hamburg-based Körber foundation.