J. Roy Taylor

For other people named Roy Taylor, see Roy Taylor (disambiguation).

James Roy Taylor (born 1949)^[1][2] is an English physicist who is professor of ultrafast physics and technology at Imperial College London.^[6][7][4]

Professor J. Roy Taylor FRS FREng
Taylor in 2017
Born	James Roy Taylor (1949-04-29) 29 April 1949 (age 76)[1][2] Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland[2]
Alma mater	Queen's University Belfast[3]
Awards	Young Medal and Prize (2007) Royal Society Rumford Medal (2012) IoP Michael Faraday Medal (2019) FRS (2017) FREng (2022)
Scientific career
Fields	Photonics[4]
Institutions	Imperial College London Technical University of Munich[2]
Thesis	Studies of Tunable Picosecond Laser Pulses and Nonlinear Interactions (1974)
Doctoral advisor	Daniel Joseph Bradley[5]
Website	imperial.ac.uk/people/jr.taylor

Education

Taylor was educated at Queen's University Belfast, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1971^[2] followed by a PhD in laser physics in 1974 for research supervised by Daniel Joseph Bradley.^[5][3]

Research and career

Taylor is widely acknowledged for his influential basic research on and development of diverse laser systems and their application.^[8] He has contributed extensively to advances in picosecond and femtosecond dye laser technology, compact diode-laser and fibre-laser-pumped vibronic lasers and their wide-ranging application to fundamental studies, such as time resolved photophysics of resonant energy transfer and relaxation pathways of biological probes and organic field-effect transistors.^[8]

Taylor is particularly noted for his fundamental studies of ultrafast nonlinear optics in fibres, with emphasis on solitons,^[9] their amplification, the role of noise and self-effects, such as Raman gain. Through his integration of seeded, high-power fibre amplifiers and passive fibre he has demonstrated far-reaching versatility in pulse duration, repetition rate and spectral coverage.^[8] He contributed extensively to the development of high power supercontinuum or “white light” sources,^[10][11] which have been a scientific and commercial success.^[8][12]

Awards and honours

Taylor's work has been recognized by the Ernst Abbe Award of the Carl Zeiss Foundation in 1990,^[2] the Young Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (IOP) in 2007, the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society in 2012^[8] and the Faraday Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 2019.^[13]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017.^[8]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2022.^[14]