Ian Alexander Walmsley CBE FRS is Provost of Imperial College London where he is also Chair of Experimental Physics. He was previously pro-vice-chancellor for research and Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Oxford,[1] and a professorial fellow at St Hugh's College, Oxford.[2] He is also director of the NQIT (Networked Quantum Information Technologies) hub within the UK National Quantum Technology Programme, which is led by the University of Oxford.[3] He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.[4]
Walmsley was educated at Imperial College London, and The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester.[2] He received the Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science in 2011[5] and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2012[6] for his contributions to quantum optics and ultrafast optics,[7] including his development of the spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER) technique.
In March 2018 it was announced that Walmsley had been appointed provost of Imperial College London, succeeding James Stirling on 1 September 2018.[8]
In October 2019, Walmsley co-founded ORCA Computing, to undertake Quantum Computing in Optical Fibre through the use of quantum memory.