Chris Phillips

Chris is a physics professor at Imperial College London, where he has been on the staff 4 about 38 years and published <350 papers with a multi million £ grant portfolio. He started off in semiconductor optoelectronics but later became interested in quantum optics and, most recently, infrared imaging for biomedical applications. He co-founded a company, Digistain, a YCombinator start-up that now employs 16 people, and offers infrared scans of breast cancer biopsies to help the oncologists diagnose cancer. It uses IR to measure the increase in DNA that occurs as the disease takes hold. At the moment Digistain analyses a part of the biopsy that has been chosen by a pathologist, but we are now developing a quantum technology method of selecting this instead. Our “EntangleCam” uses entangled photon pairs to get IR images of the whole slice with stability and accuracy that is good enough for clinical implementations. We have won many awards and prizes for this.