Swinburne researchers appointed as 2023 University Distinguished Professors

Four exceptional Swinburne researchers, Professor Margaret Reid, Professor David Moss, Professor Guoxing Lu and Professor Saeid Nahavandi, have been appointed as University Distinguished Professors at Swinburne.

This title recognises the significant and exceptional contributions these researchers have made to their research fields and to Swinburne.

Pioneering work testing quantum theory

Distinguished Professor Margaret Reid is currently a Professor and Director of the Centre for Quantum Science and Technology at Swinburne.

She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.

After completing her PhD at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, under the supervision of Dan Walls, she continued postdoctoral research at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the US. At AT&T Bell, she developed the theory for describing the “squeezing” of quantum fluctuations of light in atomic media and optical fibres.

Professor Reid was later a Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Waikato, an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Quantum Atom Optics.

Professor Reid was the first woman physicist to be awarded the Moyal Medal recognising her outstanding contributions to the field of physics.

She has held a Visiting Professor position at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in France, and visiting research positions and fellowships at ITAMP Harvard and JILA University of Colorado in the US.

She was an Associate Editor for the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review A from 2019 to 2022, and in 2019, she received the Moyal Medal for her pioneering work on how to generate and demonstrate the correlations of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox based on parametric down conversion.

Leading extensive international research in nanophotonics

Distinguished Professor David Moss has been at Swinburne since 2016, as Director of the Optical Sciences Centre since its formation in 2020 and, before that, with the Centre for Microphotonics.

He is Deputy Director of the newly-established ARC Centre of Excellence in Optical Microcombs for Breakthrough Science (COMBS), being jointly led by Swinburne and RMIT. He has worked at RMIT University, the University of Sydney and in the telecommunications industry with JDS Uniphase in Ottawa, Canada, and Hitachi Central Research Laboratories in Tokyo, Japan.

He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in Physics.

Professor Moss won the 2021 Vice-Chancellor’s Research Excellence Award for his work on optical kerr microcombs for ultrahigh bandwidth communications and neuromorphic processing.

Professor Moss has a highly successful 30-year track record in research in nonlinear optics and semiconductor devices. With over 800 journal and conference papers, he currently has over 35,000 citations on Google, with an h-index of 115. He is the highest-published author in Nature Photonics in Australia.

In 2010, he invented integrated optical microcomb chips which opened up a new field of study.

In 2021, he demonstrated the world’s fastest optical neural network, reported in Nature, and in 2016/17 reported the first photonic chips capable of generating high dimensional entangled quantum bits (Qudits) in both Nature and Science. In 2020, he demonstrated the highest speed optical communications using a single chip source.

For his invention of optical microcomb chips, he won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Science Prize and Google Australia Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. His research interests include optical microcombs, integrated nonlinear optics, quantum optics, microwave photonics, optical neural networks, optical networks and transmission, 2D materials including graphene oxide for nonlinear optics, optical signal processing, nanophotonics, and biomedical photonics for cancer diagnosis and therapy.

He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE Photonics Society, Optica (formerly the OSA) and SPIE.

Advancing novel structures and materials

Distinguished Professor Guoxing Lu is a professor of Impact Engineering in the School of Engineering. His work covers the entire breadth of impact engineering including impact mechanics and the dynamic behaviour of innovative lightweight structures and materials, with applications in aerospace, automotive, offshore, rail, civil infrastructure and defence.

He first joined Swinburne in 1995 and founded the world-class Impact Engineering Laboratory, equipped with a wide range of unique advanced testing facilities. Coupled with the latest computational tools and his deep insights into fundamentals, the laboratory is internationally-renowned and is widely used by researchers and engineers across the globe. The valuable data produced enable advanced analysis and digital design of structures, potentially saving millions of dollars from full scale tests.

He obtained his PhD in Structural Mechanics from the University of Cambridge in 1989.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Professor Guoxing Lu co-led a team of researchers and technical staff from Swinburne to produce 3D-printed headbands with Able Australia.

In recognition to his contributions, Guoxing Lu was elected to President of the International Society of Impact Engineering and Chairman of the Australian Chapter of the International Association of Protective Structures.

He is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Impact Engineering and a member of the Editorial Board for other prestigious journals such as the International Journal of Mechanical Sciences, Composites Part B, Thin-Walled Structures and Scientific Reports. He has published more than 290 journal papers with an h-index of 63. 

His monograph was the first systematic treatment in the world on the topic of energy absorption of materials and structures, with 1400 citations. Guoxing Lu has secured over $18 million research grants including 10 ARC Discovery grants and 10 Linkage projects.

Guoxing Lu is currently Associate Dean Research and has previous served as Chair of the Department of Mechanical and Product Design Engineering, and Deputy Dean Academic of former Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Sciences. He previously held tenured faculty position at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a post-doctoral position at the University of Cambridge.

Leading defence innovation

Distinguished Professor Saeid Nahavandi is Swinburne’s inaugural Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Chief of Defence Innovation. He previously served as Pro Vice-Chancellor (Defence Technologies) and Founding Director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation at Deakin University.

Professor Nahavandi is an internationally-recognised expert in intelligent robotic and haptic systems, motion platforms and simulators, autonomous vehicles, and modelling and simulation technologies, with a specific focus on innovation and training in defence and security domains.

He has published over 1000 scientific papers in various international journals and at conferences, as well as commercialised his translational research and innovative technology through startup companies.