Staff profile
| Affiliation | Telephone |
|---|---|
| Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics |
Biography
As an assistant professor in advanced instrumentation at the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation, my research focuses on development of photonics, both for astronomy and more down-to-earth research, along with developing two-photon polymerised structures for use in optics and large-scale astronomical instrumentation.
My journey in instrumentation started during my PhD at Durham University, where I developed photonic components using ultrafast laser inscription. The results from my work led to a 6-month STFC STEP award and 3-month postdoc in Durham, where I took a fibre refomatter I’d developed to the William Herschel telescope. I then moved to the Landessternwarte at Heidelberg University (Germany) to take up a 2-year Zeiss postdoctoral fellowship. Here I developed new devices and branched out into two-photon polymerisation (additive manufacturing). For this I received a Gliese fellowship from the ZAH and a Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft grant working on photonics for astronomy and grew a small astrophotonics group in Heidelberg. I then moved to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy to work on the MICADO instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope. In my latest step, I have returned to Durham as an assistant professor, to combine the smallest scales of instrumentation with some of the largest.
Publications
Journal Article
- MacLachlan, D., Harris, R., Gris-Sánchez, I., Morris, T., Choudhury, D., Gendron, E., …Thomson, R. (2017). Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light for diffraction-limited spectroscopy. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 464(4), 4950-4957. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw2558
- MacLachlan, D. G., Harris, R. J., Choudhury, D., Simmonds, R. D., Salter, P. S., Booth, M. J., …Thomson, R. R. (2016). Development of integrated mode reformatting components for diffraction-limited spectroscopy. Optics Letters, 41(1), 76-79. https://doi.org/10.1364/ol.41.000076
- Harris, R., & Allington-Smith, J. (2013). Applications of Integrated Photonic Spectrographs in astronomy. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 428(4), 3139-3150. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sts265