Electrical Properties of Materials

Laszlo Solymar was Emeritus Professor of Applied Electromagnetism at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College, London. He graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 and received the equivalent of a PhD in 1956 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1956, he settled in England where he worked first in industry and later at the University of Oxford. He conducted research on antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials, and metamaterials. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabrueck, Berlin, Madrid, Budapest, and Imperial College, London. He has published 9 books and over 400 papers. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1995, and received the Faraday Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1992.

The late Donald Walsh was an Emeritus fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated from King's College London during the second world war. He then worked for seven years at the Mullard Radio Valve Co, developing photocells and flash tubes, then for about the same period at the Services Electronics Research Labs (SERL) on travelling wave tubes, klystrons, and TR switches. He came to the Department of Engineering Science, Oxford in 1956 as a Research Fellow to help the newly appointed Reader in Electrical Engineering start a research group in microwave electronics, and later became a Lecturer and College Fellow.

Richard R. A. Syms has been Professor of Microsystems Technology in the EEE Department at Imperial College London since 1996. He graduated in Engineering Science at Oxford University in 1979, and obtained a DPhil in 1982, also from Oxford. He carried out postgraduate work at University College London, Oxford University, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory before moving to Imperial. He has published over 200 journal papers and 2 books on holography, guided wave optics, electromagnetic theory, metamaterials, magnetic resonance imaging, and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). In 2001, he co-founded the Imperial College spin-out company Microsaic Systems. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Institute of Physics, and the Institute of Engineering and Technology.