Royal Society elects UQ physicist as a Fellow

University of Queensland School of Mathematics and Physics quantum physics researcher Emeritus Professor Gerard Milburn has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Head of School Professor Joseph Grotowski said the honour recognised Professor Milburn’s “sustained contribution to physics at the highest level”.

The Royal Society comprises eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and throughout the Commonwealth.

Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life on the basis of excellence in science.

Professor Milburn joins an elite group of about 1600 Fellows and Foreign Members, including about 80 Nobel Laureates.

Each year up to 52 Fellows and up to 10 Foreign Members are elected from about 700 candidates who are proposed by the existing Fellows.

Professor Milburn obtained a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Waikato in 1982 for work on squeezed states of light and quantum non-demolition measurements.

In 1994 he was appointed Professor in Physics at UQ. In 2011 he became the founding director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems. 

Professor Milburn has worked in the fields of quantum optics, quantum stochastic processes, atom optics, quantum control and engineered quantum systems including opto mechanics and superconducting quantum circuits.

In 2001, with international colleagues Emanuel Knill and Raymond Laflamme, Professor Milburn published a scheme for quantum computing with photons, known as the KLM scheme, that has had a continuing impact on quantum optics experiments. 

Professor Milburn is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the American Physical Society.

He is the author of five books including Quantum Optics (with Dan Walls), Quantum Measurement and Control (with Howard Wiseman) and Quantum Opto mechanics (with UQ’s Professor Warwick Bowen).

Media: Professor Gerard Milburn, milburn@physics.uq.edu.au, +61 7 3346 7953.