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Contact

Email

p.a.campbell@dundee.ac.uk

Phone

+44 (0)1382 384404

Biography

Dr Paul Campbell was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Dundee in the Carnegie Laboratory in 2005, and is presently Reader in Physics. In the academic year ahead, Paul will be teaching the modules: PH31007 Electrodynamics I (3rd Year); PH12003 Space Physics & Astronomy (1st Year); & PH42006 Nuclear & Elementary Particle Physics (4th Year). His research interests are mainly geared towards the exploitation and applications of Physics, in both the contexts of Medicine and a range of industrial settings. He is Principal Investigator on several externally funded research projects including a Royal Society Industry Fellowship, and hold active research funding together with in-house collaborators that is in excess of £6 million. He leads both the CICaSS team, where the focus is on developing industry-linked concepts involving cavitation-based phenomena, and also the Undergraduate Research Group, which has a much broader research but embraces aspects of online- and homeland-security as a focal activity at present. In 2014 he was a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he researched aspects of cavitation with Professor Chris Brennen of Caltech's Engineering Faculty. He spent the summer of 2015 as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, working with Professor Keisuke Goda on the development of ultra high speed imaging technologies.

 

Education

BSc Physics (London, Queen Mary College) 1990

PhD Condensed Matter Physics (Queen's University Belfast) 1994

MLitt Comics Studies (University of Dundee) 2013

FInstP (Fellow Institute of Physics 2004)

FRAS (Fellow Royal Astronomical Society 2005)

Experience

Higher Scientific Officer - Defence Research Agency (Farnborough) (93-94)

Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Universities of Bath (Materials Science) & Queen's Belfast (Probe Microscopy) (94-98)

Lecturer in Applied Physics (RGU 98-2000)

Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow - Ninewells Hospital Dundee (Surgical Technology) (2000-2003)

Visiting Scholar - Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (Ultrasound mediated drug delivery) (2003 & 2005)

Lecturer (2005), Senior Lecturer (2006) and now Reader (2007 -present) at University of Dundee.

MRC Discipline Hopping Fellowship, College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee (2008)

JSPS Invitation Fellowship, Fukuoka Medical School, Japan (2009)

Royal Society Industry Fellowship, Ionscope, Cambridge (2009-2013)

Royal Society of Edinburgh Travel Scholarship, California Institute of Technology (2014)

JSPS Visiting Professor, University of Tokyo (2015)

Research

The main thrust of Paul's research revolves around applications of cavitation - the creation and forced-driving of gas bubbles in liquid environments. In combination with ultrasound and lasers, cavitation can be exploited to cleanse submerged surfaces, or even to deliver therapeutic molecules in a non-invasive fashion. In pursuit of this, Paul tries to understand the fundamental interactions of ultrasound with various target biological structures, from tissues to cells. This is an experimentally demanding research programme, requiring direct observation of very dynamic microscopic entities, with sub-microsecond temporal resolution. Initial data in this area was published in the highly rated journal, Nature - Physics: a paper that has now been cited over 250 times.

His main experimental areas of expertise are with scanning probe microscopies; optical trapping; thermography; and high speed imaging.

Other areas of interest relate to covert biometric measurements for identity authentication and for the detection of deception; the roles and portrayal of Physicists in society, especially in comics; and most recently, the utility of soap-films and related structures as scaled analogues in biophysical and cosmological contexts.

View full research profile and publications

PhD Projects

Principal supervisor

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