Philip Russell

Philip St. John Russell, FRS, (born March 25, 1953, in Belfast) is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. His area of research covers "photonics and new materials", in particular the examination of new optical materials, especially of photonic crystal fibres, and more generally the field of nano- and micro-structured photonic materials. Education and career Russell obtained his DPhil in 1979 at the University of Oxford, where he was working on volume holography. From 1978 he was a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. In 1982 he moved to the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. In 1986 he joined the fibre optics group at the University of Southampton and began to work on the realisation of his idea of photonic crystal fibres, which were first demonstrated practically in 1996. Between 1996 and 2005, Russell worked at the University of Bath, and during his time there built up and led the Photonics and Photonic Materials Group (PPMG). He then joined the Max Planck Research Group at the Institute of Optics, Information and Photonics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, which became the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) in 2009, with him being a founding director. He has been Emritus Director of the MPL since 2021. He is the founder of BlazePhotonics Limited, a company whose aim was the commercial exploitation of photonic crystal fibre. The company, which holds the world record for low loss hollow core photonic crystal fibre, was acquired by Crystal Fibre a/s in August 2004.