When you send a message, your personal data, bank transfers, medical records, and so much more over the internet, you want them to remain private. To do this communication is encrypted. But the best encryption you currently use can eventually be broken by powerful computers. I work on quantum communication – an encryption technique that is based on immutable and fundamental laws of physics to ensure that malicious decryption is impossible no matter how powerful a computer a hacker uses.

My focus is to bring these technologies out of the lab and into the real world. To this end I am working on building small satellites (small enough to hold in your hand) for global scale quantum communication, long distance fibre optic based quantum communication for terrestrial links and many user large and complex quantum networks to create the quantum internet.

I also work on quantum metrology (the science of measurements) and use the fascinating properties of quantum physics to make measurements more precise or even to be able to take images at one wavelength without ever detecting light at that wavelength.