The Director
Director of the QIP IRC
Andrew Briggs is Professor of Nanomaterials at Oxford University, and currently holds an EPSRC Professorial Research Fellowship. He studied for his Ph.D. with Professor David Tabor in the Physics and Chemistry of Solids group at the Cavendish Laboratory. He came to the Department of Materials at Oxford as a postdoc with Professor Sir Peter Hirsch, to develop applications of acoustic microscopy. He was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship in the Physical Sciences, and within two years was appointed to a University Lectureship. With the invention of scanning tunnelling microscopy he studied surfaces at ever higher resolution, using elevated temperatures to image oxides and semiconductor quantum dots during growth. Following a sabbatical at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, he became interested in the properties of carbon nanomaterials for quantum computing. Recent work in his group has demonstrated exquisitely precise manipulation of quantum states, and has contributed the entry for the smallest test tube in The Guinness Book of World Records. His work is characterised by a strong combination of experimental observation and theoretical modelling. He has over 470 publications, the majority in internationally refereed journals. He has led several interdisciplinary projects, with major industrial sponsorship from companies such as BNFL, Toppan, Hitachi, and Hewlett-Packard. In 2002 EPSRC appointed him Director of the QIP IRC, with a brief to build and coordinate a multidisciplinary team of researchers to address key challenges in Quantum Information Processing.
Andrew Briggs is a Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. In 1986 he was awarded the Holliday Prize of the Institute of Metals, and in 1999 was a winner of the Metrology for World Class Manufacturing Award. From 1992-2002 he was Professeur invité at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, and in 2002 he was Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales; he is Guest Professor at the State Key Laboratory for Nanotechnology in Wuhan, China. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College. He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers. He holds a Private Pilots Licence. He has a degree in Theology from Cambridge University. He serves on the Board of Management of the Ian Ramsey Centre, and the Editorial Boards of Science & Christian Belief and Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science.
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(Photograph supplied by Mr Mark Jones, Department of Materials, University of Oxford)