A range of international and national plenary speakers have been invited to present at the AIP/ACOFT 2010 Congress. This information will be updated as acceptances are received.
Professor Bruce Allen (Germany)
Bruce Allen was born in Boston in 1959. He originally planned to study Electrical Engineering, but changed majors soon after arriving at MIT, where he graduated with a BS in Physics in 1980. Allen was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University, where he received a PhD in Gravitational and Cosmology in 1984, working under the direction of Stephen Hawking, on problems related to the very early universe. Allen was subsequently a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and the Observatoire de Paris – Meudon. In 1989 Allen took up a faculty position at the U of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. He was promoted to full professor in 1997, around the same time that he started working on gravitational wave detection. In 2006 Allen was named a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (the Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, Germany. Allen is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics. He also directs the Einstein@Home project. Allen is married and has two children.
Dr Jeremy Mould (Melbourne, Australia)
Dr Jeremy Mould was recently Director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in the U.S.A. and formerly Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of The Australian National University. He was professor of astronomy at the ANU, and prior to that, professor of astronomy at Caltech. He is an alumnus of the University of Melbourne and is currently Professorial Fellow there. Dr Mould’s research interests are in observational cosmology and how stars and galaxies age and evolve. He is especially well known for his work with the Hubble Space Telescope on the size and age of the Universe. He received the Gruber Prize for cosmology for this work in 2009, together with colleagues, Robert Kennicutt and Wendy Freedman. In 2001 Dr Mould’s research discoveries were recognized through a Thomson ISI Australian Citation Laureate. Other awards include the Oort Professorship in 1998 from Leiden University, and together with his late colleague Marc Aaronson, the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society. Dr Mould has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science since 1998. At his election to the Academy he was cited for original work showing that the history of dwarf galaxies, previously thought to be constituted from the earliest stellar population in the Universe, was in fact complex, with substantial, even dominant, contributions from younger generations of stars.
Professor Margaret Murnane (United State of America)
Margaret Murnane is a Fellow of JILA and a faculty member in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado. She runs a joint research group with her husband, Professor Henry Kapteyn. She received her B.S and M.S. degrees from University College Cork, Ireland and her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. She remained at Berkeley for one year as a postdoctoral fellow, before joining the faculty at Washington State University in 1990. In 1996, Professor Murnane moved to the University of Michigan and in 1999 she moved to the University of Colorado. Professor Murnane and her group use coherent beams of laser and x-ray light to capture the fastest dynamics in molecules and materials at the nanoscale. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America and the AAAS. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. She was also awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Margaret and Henry shared the 2009 Ahmed Zewail Award of the ACS and the 2010 Schawlow Prize of the APS. Professor Murnane is very interested in increasing diversity in science and engineering.
Professor David Payne (United Kingdom)
Professor David N Payne, CBE, FRS, FREng, is the Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton. He led the team that first reported the optical fibre laser and the erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) and is credited with many other key advances in optical fibre technology over the last forty years. His career has spanned both the academic and the commercial, where his activities have led to a cluster of ten companies in the local area. Payne has won the John Tyndall Award (USA), the Rank Prize for Optics, the Japanese Computers and Communications Prize, the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Medal (USA), the Basic Research Award by the Eduard Rhein Foundation, and the Mountbatten Medal of the IEE. For his unique contributions to both science and engineering, in 2004 he was awarded the Kelvin medal by the combined UK Societies. In 2007 he received the IEEE Photonics Award for outstanding achievements in photonics and in 2008 he became a Millennium Prize Laureate.
Dr Barbara Terhal (United States of America)
Barbara M. Terhal obtained a PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1999. From 1999 to 2001 she was at the IBM Watson Research Center as a Visiting Scientist and in 2002 she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Caltech. In the Fall of 2002 she joined the IBM Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member. Barbara Terhal has been working in various sub-areas of quantum information science, ranging from quantum entanglement to quantum cryptography and quantum algorithms. Her current active interests are in quantum complexity theory and quantum fault-tolerance. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an associate editor of the journal `Quantum Information and Computation’.