Benjamin Eggleton is a professor of physics at the University of Sydney, where he directs the Centre for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems, a multi-campus research team with more than 100 members. He currently serves as the president of the Australian Optical Society and is a fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
After obtaining a PhD from the University of Sydney in 1996, he went on to the United States to work as a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories and then later he became research director of the Specialty Fiber Business Division of Lucent Technologies. He has co-authored almost 200 papers and won several prestigious awards including the Prime Minister’s Malcolm McIntosh Science Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America and the Pawsey Medal. In 2010, he represented Australia unaccompanied at the Science and Technology in Society forum in Kyoto, Japan. He was one of only ten scientists selected from around the globe by the New York Academy of Sciences to give a presentation.
Eggleton was awarded the Walter Boas Medal in 2011.