Dr. Claire Cisowski

Claire Cisowski is an early career Leverhulme research fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, UK. She received a B.S. and an M.S. in Physics from the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France, and holds a Ph.D in experimental physics from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She joined the University of Glasgow in 2020 after being awarded a prestigious International Newton Fellowship from the Royal Society and has since actively collaborated with both the optics group led by Prof. Franke-Arnold and the quantum theory group led by Prof. Stephen Barnett.

Dr. Cisowski's unique research profile combines experimental, theoretical, and numerical expertise in light sources engineered in their phase and polarization degrees of freedom. She works at the intersection of pure mathematics and applied optics, with her current research focusing on geometric phases and exotic topological textures of light. She has also designed novel integrated light sources and developed new tools for the rapidly expanding field of inverse design during her postdoctoral journey.

She is one of the founding members and the former president of the Optica Student Chapter of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (2018-2019). Passionate about fostering international collaborations, she organized the first Brazil-Scotland meeting on structured light in 2021, an initiative that united local student chapters across the two nations. She is an active member of the women in physics network of the University of Glasgow and has been a reviewer for Optica's Women Scholars program since 2022. She is deeply invested in outreach and has delivered a wide range of activities through partnerships with local schools, university open days and science festivals. She was elected chair of Optica's Polarization Management and Propagation (FP) in January 2024 for a three-year term and is committed to empowering PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the early stages of their research careers.

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