Plenary Speakers

University of Colorado

 Margaret the Director of the National Science Foundation STROBE Center on Real Time Functional Imaging, and a Fellow of JILA at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She runs a joint, multi-disciplinary, research group with her husband, Henry Kapteyn. She received her B.S and M.S. degrees from University College Cork, Ireland, and her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. Prof. Murnane with students and collaborators uses coherent beams of laser and x-ray light to capture the fastest coupled charge, spin and phonon dynamics in materials at the nanoscale. 

University of Glasgow

Optics Research Group covering a wide spectrum from blue-sky research to applied commercial development, funded by a combination of government charity and industry.

His research group covers all things optical from the basic ways in which light behaves as it pushes and twists the world around us to the application of new optical techniques in imaging and sensing systems. 

He is currently the Principal Investigator of QuantIC, the UK's Centre of excellence for research, development and innovation in quantum enhanced imaging, bringing together eight Universities with more than 40 industry partners. 

During his 5-year term as Vice-Principal for Research he and his team championed how an improved research culture was not an alternative to excellence but rather what would allow more of us to excel.

He is a Fellow both of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society, in addition to a number of subject specific societies. He has won a number of national and international prizes (see below) including, in 2019, the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. In 2019 he was also named by Web of Science as globally highly-cited researcher, one of only eight physicists in the UK.

University of Toronto

Ted Sargent received the B.Sc.Eng. (Engineering Physics) from Queen’s University in 1995 and the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Photonics) from the University of Toronto in 1998. He has been a faculty member at UofT since 1998; and spent sabbaticals at MIT (Microphotonics Center), UCLA (Fulbright Visiting Professor), Berkeley (Somorjai Visiting Miller Professor), and Harvard (Rowland Institute Visiting Distinguished Scholar). He is University Professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. He serves as Vice President – Research for the University of Toronto. He founded and served as CTO of InVisage Technologies. His publications have been cited 50,000 times [Scopus].