The Dennis Gabor Lecture
The Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering’s annual invited lecture honours Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holography. The lecture series focuses on the impact of science and engineering on society.
Dennis Gabor
The Hungarian-born electrical engineer Dennis Gabor won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography, a system of lensless, three-dimensional photography that has many applications.
A research engineer for the firm of Siemens and Halske in Berlin from 1927, Gabor left Germany in 1933 and worked with the Thomson-Houston Company in England, later becoming a British subject. In 1947 he conceived the idea of holography and by employing conventional filtered-light sources, developed the basic technique. Conventional light sources generally provided either too little light, or light that was too diffuse, so holography did not become commercially feasible until the 1960s with the demonstration of the laser, which amplifies the intensity of light waves.
In 1949 Gabor joined the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, where in 1958 he became professor of applied electron physics. His other work included research on high-speed oscilloscopes, communication theory, physical optics, and television. Gabor was awarded more than 100 patents.
Previous Dennis Gabor Lectures
Previous Dennis Gabor Lectures
- 2024 The Long History of the Future - Nicole Kobie
- 2023 Science: Delivering for the long term - Professor Dame Angela McLean
- 2021 Innovation after the pandemic - Matt Ridley
- 2019 Inventing the Future - Sir Mark Walport
- 2017 Life After the App: How Humans Will Connect With Ubiquitous Sensing - Professor J Paradiso
- 2016 Engineering a better world: pursuing Dennis Gabor's vision - Naomi Climer FREng BSc CEng FIET
- 2015 U+ Life: The Era of MicroChip Medicine - Professor Chris Toumazou
- 2014 The Electron Revolution in Propulsion - Colin Smith CBE
- 2013 The Life and Times of Dennis Gabor - Professor Laszlo Solymar
- 2012 Plastic Electronics: Excitons and Solar Cells - Professor Sir Richard Friend