UNLOC director Polina Bayvel elected fellow of the Royal Society

1 May, 2016

Prof Polina Bayvel, the director of the EPSRC-funded UNLOC programme and head of the ONG group in UCL, will become an elected fellow of the Royal Society at a formal ceremony in July.

Prof Polina Bayvel was elected  to become a fellow of the Royal Society this year after securing more than 2/3 of the votes. Each year the Royal Society elects up to 52 new fellows who have made 'a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science'.  This is another recognition to Prof Bayvel's major contributions to the investigation and design of high-bandwidth, multi-wavelength optical communication networks. 

Prof Bayvel is described on the Royal Society website as "...one of the first to show the feasibility of using the wavelength domain for routing in optical etworks over a range of distance- and time-scales. She has established the applicability of these new optical network architecture concepts, which have been widely implemented in commercial systems and networks. These systems and networks underpin the Internet, and the digital communications infrastructure - and are essential for its growth."

Prof Bayvel's research is focused on maximising the speed and capacity of optical fibre transmission systems, and the fundamental studies of capacity-limiting optical nonlinearities and their mitigation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2002), and a recipient of a number of awards. These include the 2013 IEEE Photonic Society Engineering Achievement Award, 2014 Royal Society Clifford Paterson Lecture & Medal, and 2015 Royal Academy of Engineering Colin Campbell Mitchell Award.

I am excited about being elected, it's an enormous honour, probably one of the greatest for a research scientist. I am very grateful to my wonderful and brilliant research students and colleagues in the Optical Networks Group and the Electronic& Electrical Engineering Dept who share in this success, and my UCL home. I have been very fortunate to have had inspirational and supportive mentors, to whom I am very grateful. - said Prof Bayvel.

Image: Prof. Bayvel delivering the Royal Society Clifford paterson Lecture on Oct 27, 2014. Watch a  video recording of the lecture on Youtube.