Dr Tom Charrett is a Lecturer in Optical Sensors within the Centre for Engineering Photonics at Cranfield University in the UK. He has been involved with optical instrumentation for over twenty years, with experience in a range of optical techniques including laser speckle correlation and speckle interferometry, full-field imaging instrumentation, and fibre optic and bulk optical interferometry. His current research includes the development of novel optical instrumentation for application in robotics, and automation and manufacturing including for Wire and Arc Additive manufacturing and laser processing.

Professor Julian Fells gained a first class degree in Electronic Engineering from UCL in 1991 and a PhD from Bath University in 1995. He then spent 10 years within Corporate Research Centres, GEC Marconi and Nortel Networks, where he worked on a variety of optical devices and systems. He was then R&D Manager at Cambridge University spin-out Splashpower. In 2009 he joined the leadership team of Stingray Geophysical, where he led the development of an off-shore seismic optical fibre sensor system. In 2015 he moved to the University of Oxford, where he established and leads the Optical Fibre Sensors Group.

Dimitars Jevtics (PhD, MInstP) received his Master of Engineering in Electronic Engineering and Nanotechnology from the University of York in 2015. That same year, he joined the Institute of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde as a PhD student, working on the heterogeneous integration of nanophotonic components, particularly nanowire lasers, using advanced micro‑transfer‑printing techniques. He now works as a senior Research Associate in the Integrated Optics group led by Prof. Michael J. Strain, where his research focuses on the design, fabrication, integration, and characterisation of next‑generation nanophotonic emitters for quantum and optical computing applications.

Samer Kurdi is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University’s Quantum Photonics Laboratory and holder of a Dutch NWO Veni Fellowship. His research explores spin and charge transport in quantum materials – including superconductors and twodimensional magnets – using nanoscale magnetic imaging using spin defects in wide bandgap semiconductors. His PhD at the University of Cambridge was part of the Marie Curie SELECTA network, focusing on magnetic materials and spintronics, complemented by research visits in Japan, Germany, and Italy. Before joining Heriot-Watt, he worked on quantum sensing and time-resolved magnetism at TU Delft and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Charalambos Louca is a physicist working at the frontier of atomically thin materials, polariton physics, and ultrafast nanophotonics. As a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, he studies and engineers strong nonlinear optical behaviour in low-dimensional semiconductors, hybrid light–matter quasiparticles, and plasmonic systems. His work has delivered advances in enhanced dipolar exciton–polariton nonlinearities and femtosecond switching in microcavities based on two-dimensional semiconductors. With research experience in Sheffield, Milan, and Cambridge, he is developing novel nanostructures for next-generation ultralow-energy optical technologies.