OSA Fellow Allister Ferguson was educated at the University of St.Andrews, Scotland where he received his bachelor and doctoral degrees in 1974 and 1977, respectively. With the aid of a Lindemann Fellowship, he worked with Art Schawlow and Ted Hänsch at Stanford University. Returning to the UK in 1979, he had faculty positions at the Universities Oxford and Southampton before taking up the Chair of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in 1989. He was Deputy Principal and is now senior adviser to the Principal and Vice Chancellor.

Ferguson has made significant contributions to lasers, laser spectroscopy, and nonlinear optics. He has worked on a number of applications from basic science through to biomedical applications. At Strathclyde, he has established a number of interface organisations including the Institute of Photonics, Centre for Biophotonics and SU2P (a consortium of Scottish Universities with Stanford and Caltech). He has been instrumental in Coherent Inc. and Fraunhofer establishing facilities in Glasgow.

He won the 2019 Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award from OSA “for extraordinary leadership creating major international optics and photonics research centers and programs that support the global optics and photonics community.”