Tara graduated with an integrated masters (MPhys) in Engineering Physics at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, UK) in June 2022. Both her bachelor and master projects involved high power laser welding of various metals. Tara has relevant industry experience from her placement with Leonardo during the summer of 2021 as a Laser Engineer. Upon graduating, Tara joined the ultra-short pulsed laser welding project as a PhD student in September 2022. Her project focuses on extending the laser welding process to IR-materials with the use of the emerging 2-micron wavelength technology.

Wanqi graduated with his Bachelor of Science degree of Electronic Engineering at Bangor University, UK in 2021 and Master of Science degree of Electronics at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2022. Wanqi’s research backgrounds include fibre Bragg grating sensing technique in structural health monitoring and exceptional point biosensing in Whispering Gallery Mode optical resonator. His research interests involve FBG technology, optical and biomedical sensing.
Wanqi joined AOP group as a PhD student in October 2022. He is currently working on the “Mechanically-intelligent” Intra-operative Tissue Assessment for Robot-Assisted Surgery (MIRAS) project to develop a tip-force sensing instrument in order to have various mechanical feedback for tissue assessment during robot-assisted surgery.

Jakob graduated with bachelor’s in mechanical engineering (BEng) from Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) in May 2021. His final year undergraduate project involved using non-invasive imagining modalities to characterize and quantify skin wounds. Jakob joined the 3D beam shaping project in October 2022. His project focuses on the fundamental laser material interactions that occur in transparent materials, with the aim to gain a better understanding of the timescales that different phenomena occur.

Paul graduated with an integrated master’s in physics (MPhys) from the University of St Andrews in 2020. His master’s project explored speckle metrology, specifically its applications for the measurement of fractional values of orbital angular momentum. After graduating, Paul joined the CDT in Applied Photonics as an EngD student. He works in collaboration with MBDA UK on a project investigating the implementation of LIDAR in extreme environments.

James studied his undergraduate degree at Strathclyde University, graduating in 2019 with an integrated MPhys qualification. His final year project involved fluorescent quantum dot characterisation using steady-state and time-resolved spectroscopy.
Upon graduating he joined the EngD CDT in Applied Photonics at Heriot-Watt in 2019, and carries out his research at Fraunhofer CAP on distributed fibre optic sensing development towards renewable energy applications. His work in part involves developing existing distributed acoustic and distributed temperature sensors at Fraunhofer.

Tatiana Malikova (Karpova) received a B.Sc. in Applied Physics and Mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Russia) in 2020 and an M.Sc. in Laser physics in 2022. Her research focused on measuring optical properties of turbid media and biological tissues. During her master’s studies, Tatiana worked as an intern in the R&D department of the Russian branch of IPG Photonics corporation, where she participated in the quality assessment of medical laser devices and production of acousto-optical devices. In October 2022, Tatiana joined the AOP group as a PhD student to work on the U-Care project. Her role is to study the ablation of biological tissues by deep-UV ultrashort laser pulses and its potential for high-precision surgery.

Declan graduated from Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, UK) in June 2023 with an integrated Masters degree in Physics (MPhys).
Both his master and bachelor projects involved the designing and construction of ultrafast fibre laser systems. He also completed a summer project in the AOP group in the summer of 2022 sponsored by AWE. He had the opportunity to work on a project in which he designed and performed an experimental process for the machining of a bimetallic material.
Upon graduating Declan joined the AOP group in October 2023 as a PhD student where his research is focused on Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) and their application for in-vivo actuated medical devices.