Biography
Richard Bowman is a URF & Reader in Optics, primarily interested in instrumentation, automation, and making science more accessible and transparent. His group’s focus is the OpenFlexure Project, which released open source hardware and software designs for an automated microscope in 2016, and has since grown to a global community project with hundreds of members. Thousands of microscopes have been made and used in over 60 countries spanning every continent, from quantum optics to medical research and community education. He is a passionate advocate for open hardware in science. Open hardware can make science more rigorous, transparent, and reproducible while also making it more accessible.
Richard started his research career working on holographic optical tweezers and high speed imaging for his PhD at Glasgow in 2008-12. He moved to Cambridge to take up a research fellowship for 4 years at the Nanophotonics Centre, led by Prof. Jeremy Baumberg. There, he worked on automated microspectroscopy of plasmonic nanostructures, and liquid crystal waveguide engineering. He moved to the University of Bath in 2017 to take up a University Prize Fellowship and shifted focus to work on the OpenFlexure Microscope before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2018, and moving to Glasgow in 2022.
Website
Affiliation
University of Glasgow, UK
Category
Debate speaker, 2026