Paul French

Paul French received his BSc (Hons) degree in physics in 1983 and PhD in laser optics in 1987 from Imperial College London. He was a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Imperial from 1989 until 1994, when he joined the academic staff. He also worked at the University of New Mexico (1988) and at AT&T Bell Laboratories, (1990/91).

Since 1999 he has been a Professor in the Physics Department at Imperial, serving as Head of the Photonics Group from 2001-2013. He is currently Vice Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Natural Sciences. His research group is based in the Physics Department at Imperial with a satellite laboratory at the Crick since 2017.

The research has evolved from ultrafast dye and solid-state laser physics to biomedical optics for applications in molecular cell biology, drug discovery and clinical diagnosis. His current portfolio includes the development and application of multidimensional fluorescence imaging technology for super-resolved microscopy, automated high content analysis, endoscopy and tomography, with open source approaches to instrumentation, including hardware, data acquisition and analysis.