FUTURE: NANOSCIENCE

Prof. Sir John Pendry FRS, the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, is a condensed matter theorist.

He has brought about the most significant advances in electromagnetism through his concept and designs of a new class of materials, metamaterials, which have led to the manufacture of lenses that beat the diffraction limit, and cloaks to render objects invisible. Metamaterials massively expand the material parameters available in all ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum from the visible down to DC fields. He made an equally remarkable contribution by his discovery of the ‘perfect lens’ whose resolution is limited only by perfection of manufacture and not by the wavelength.

Prof. Pendry is the recipient of numerous prizes and medals including the Kavli Prize (2014), the Isaac Newton Medal (2013), the UNESCO-Niels Bohr Gold Medal (2010), the Royal Medal (2006), Royal Society Bakerian Lecture (2005), Larmor Lecture (Belfast) (2005), Fröhlich Lecture (Liverpool) (2005), the EU Decartes Prize for “Extending Electromagnetism through Novel Artificial Materials” (2005), Knight Bachelor (2004), Celsius Lecture, University of Uppsala, Sweden (2004), Appleton Lecture (2003), the Institute of Physics Dirac Medal and Prize (1996), the International Surface Structure Prize (1996), and the British Vacuum Council Prize and Medal (1994).