Department of Physics Equality, Diversity and Inclusion stories

Prof Martin Dawson awarded Taler Medal

Professor Martin Dawson awarded the Fraunhofer Taler (Medal)

Professor Martin Dawson was awarded the prestigious Fraunhofer Taler (Medal) in a ceremony held in Munich on 3rd December 2024. This award, presented to Martin on behalf of Fraunhofer’s Executive Board by Executive Vice President Elisabeth Ewen, is a medal of honour for outstanding achievements in applied research and services to the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.

The award marks Martin’s almost 13 years of service as the inaugural Head of Centre and Scientific Director of the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics, Glasgow, which is co-located with the Institute of Photonics. Under Martin’s leadership, Fraunhofer CAP has grown to over 70 staff and students with a competitively won portfolio to date of over 285 projects with over 135 industrial partners. Fraunhofer CAP is particularly prominent in the UK’s National Quantum Technology Programme, and in broader areas including laser-based stand-off chemical and environmental sensing and LIDAR.

Professor Dawson has now handed over the Headship of Fraunhofer CAP to his successor, Professor Loyd McKnight, but he will remain actively involved in Fraunhofer CAP as senior advisor in his new role of Director Emeritus and he continues to be Director of Research in the Institute of Photonics.

Reader, Experimental Quantum Optics and Photonics Group

From the very start life took a pretty exciting and dramatic change for both myself and my wife Sonja with the births of our three children 2001-5. Sonja and I are both physicists, with independent careers and it was important to both of us that childcare and work were evenly shared (with the exception of pregnancy of course…).

For 13 years we both worked part-time, at increasing hours as the kids grew up, benefitting from the Strathclyde nursery. Childcare is hard, much harder than physics, but also truly rewarding. Most people in the department were very understanding, and I will never forget our secretary Jean parading our babies around the department, singing nursery songs at full volume!

There was flexible timetabling, e.g., my lectures are still in two-hour slots, which turned out to be what the students preferred anyway. My office occasionally doubled as a changing room, and I’m really pleased to see the recent addition of dedicated facilities in the building. I think having to juggle family and career made me more efficient with my time and I’d thoroughly recommend it. However, working hours in academia aren’t limited and you need to be constantly wary of being judged - by others, but also yourself - against full-time colleagues.