Kishan Dholakia studied at Churchill College Cambridge and then Imperial College, London where he completed his Ph.D. in laser cooling of trapped ions. He moved to St Andrews and secured a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Fellowship. He became full Professor in 2003 and is a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Fellow for 2015-2016. He holds an adjunct Professor position at the University of Arizona, USA and a visiting Professor position at Chiba University, Japan.

Dholakia’s research experience spans a wide range of optics. He started in the area of laser cooling of trapped ions and applications for plasma physics and quantum mechanics. He then progressed to the use of shaped light fields for studies in optical manipulation, both for fundamental science and interdisciplinary biomedical applications. More recently his group has also branched into advanced forms of imaging for biomedicine, particularly using light sheet microscopy.

He was elected a Fellow of OSA in 2008. More recently, he received the 2016 R. W. Wood Prize “for pioneering research contributions into optical micromanipulation using shaped light for interdisciplinary photonics-based implementations.”