Bristol academic awarded prestigious Toshiba research Fellowship

Dr Mark Thompson, in the Centre for Communications Research/Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and the Department of Physics at the University has recently been awarded the prestigious Toshiba Research Fellowship, where he will be spending one year working alongside Toshiba researchers at the Toshiba R&D Headquarters in Kawasaki, Japan. Dr Thompson’s research interests are in the understanding and development of ‘Integrated Photonic Circuits’ for applications as diverse as ultra-fast laser systems, high speed communications systems, optical interconnects, quantum information processing and quantum computation.

In conjunction with Toshiba, Dr Thompson will be working on the development of ‘Silicon Integrated Photonics’, a technology that is attracting attention not only from academia but also from many serious industrial players.  This new technology promises to revolutionise information processing and communication, from large scale computer networks right down to the internal workings of the microprocessor, and ultimately the development of a quantum computer.

The Toshiba Fellowship Programme has been established for over 25 years, and offers outstanding scientists an annual opportunity to apply to join Toshiba’s R&D laboratories, living & working in Japan for up to two years. The Fellowship Programme is a collaboration between Toshiba and the EPSRC, aimed at fostering and developing the relationship between Japanese industry and UK academia.  It offers a chance to journey alongside Toshiba into innovation, discovering a new world of research & development, as well as exploring and living a new cultural experience in Japan.

Dr Thompson is a member of the Centre for Communications Research and the Centre for Quantum Photonics at the University of Bristol where he is working on the development of ‘Integrated Quantum Photonic Technologies’.