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John Tisch is Professor of Laser Physics at Imperial College London. He heads the Light Community—one of five research sections in the Department of Physics—where researchers harness the versatility of optics across fields ranging from biomedical imaging and nanophotonics to quantum technologies, ultrafast laser science, and advanced light sources. He is Director of the Imperial eXtreme Light Consortium (xLC), a collaboration between the Light and Matter Communities that investigates extreme light–matter interactions, from attosecond timescales and intense laser fields to novel X-ray sources and their applications. He is also a Director of London Light and the Imperial Network Frontiers of Ultrafast Measurements, and co-PI of the Imperial Laboratory of Ultrafast X-ray Diffraction (LUXD), funded by a £3.2M EPSRC Strategic Equipment Grant. His research lies at the interface of laser physics, ultrafast optics, and atomic, molecular and optical science, with applications spanning fundamental electron dynamics to advanced light sources for imaging and diagnostics.

His research centres on the development and application of high-intensity femtosecond lasers and few-cycle light pulses, particularly for generating and characterising ultrashort bursts of light in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and attosecond domains. These tools enable the observation of electron motion on its natural timescale and open new routes for probing matter with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution.

Tisch’s early research focused on generating high-energy electrons and ions through intense laser–cluster interactions, including the first observation of MeV ions from such interactions — work that paved the way for demonstrating nuclear fusion in deuterium clusters.

He led the UK’s first development of attosecond science and technology, helping establish the nation as a key contributor to this global field. Attosecond science was recognised by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier.

Tisch has made foundational contributions to high-harmonic generation (HHG) and attosecond science, advancing understanding of the spatial, temporal, and coherence properties of HHG light. His group made the first measurements of attosecond “half-cycle cutoffs", now a standard tool for probing ultrafast electronic and molecular dynamics. Other highlights include the fastest measurement of molecular structural rearrangement (“PACER”); the discovery of the “Perfect Wave” for maximising HHG energy; the first attosecond-resolution studies of photoemission from semiconductors and plasmonic surfaces; development of the ARIES technique for directly measuring light waveforms with attosecond precision; and insights into ultrafast coherence in light-harvesting systems.

His recent work extends to applied ultrafast science, in projects supported by AWE and the Dstl. These include multicolour femtosecond field synthesis for near-arbitrary waveform generation, UV-based optical communications, and using XUV pulses as plasma diagnostics. His group’s femtosecond pulse-compression systems have been supplied to over twenty international laboratories, accelerating progress across ultrafast science.

Tisch is also committed to public engagement. He led an exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition, for which he received the Dean's Excellence Award for Public Engagement. He has also been active in other outreach initiatives, giving numerous lectures to student audiences of all ages and appearing on the BBC Naked Scientists radio podcast. He was co-founder and co-director for almost 10 years of the Faculty of Science Make a Difference (MAD) Competition, which challenges undergraduate students to develop low-cost technologies with a positive societal impact, offering funding, lab space, expert supervision, and prizes to support the most promising ideas.

He earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Tasmania and completed his PhD at Imperial College London, supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship. He held an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship and worked at ETH Zurich before joining Imperial as a lecturer in 2003. He was promoted to Professor in 2009.

Professor Tisch has supervised more than 20 PhD students and serves on the committees of several major international conferences, including CLEO and ATTO. He was General Chair of the Ultrafast Optics conference and is a founding chair of the Ultrafast Dynamical Imaging of Matter series. He has served on the International Scientific Advisory Committee for ELI-ALPS and chairs the User Access Panel for the Artemis facility at the Central Laser Facility. He served as Head of the Quantum Optics and Laser Science group in the Physics Department for 5 years. He is a Fellow of both the Institute of Physics and Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America).

Selected metrics (Google Scholar, May 2026)

h-index = 52

i10-index = 101

Publication profile including Nature, Science, Nature Physics, Nature Photonics, Nature LSA, PRX, Optica, 12x Physical Review Letters, 15x Optics Letters.

Teaching (current)

Lecturing: First Year Electrostatics (part of Vector Fields and Electromagnetism Module)

Seminar Leading: First Year Professional Skills

Selected Publications (in current REF window):

Y. Li et al. Ultrafast switching of optical properties in a doped semiconductor by intense femtosecond laser pulses, Nature:Light Sci Appl 15 336 (2026) [IF = 23.4]