irmmw-thz society conference IEEE ultra high frequency electronics

Terry Parker is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, where he was Professor of Physics from 1991 until his retirement in 2005, and he is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP). He received the BSc and PhD degrees from the University of London, and for the first 25 years of his career he worked at various colleges in the University of London, apart from periods of a year or two at Northern Electric Research Labs in Ottawa, Ontario, Guest Worker at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK, the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva, and Senior Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of Physics at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. He has also been Visiting Professor of Physics in Cardiff and at several universities in China. 

His research was focused on novel aspects of Fourier transform spectroscopy, such as dispersive Fourier transform spectroscopy, (DFTS), attenuated total reflection spectroscopy (ATR), and polarised oblique incidence reflection spectroscopy, which he used to study bulk, surface and interface phonon, plasmon and magnetic modes in a wide range of solids. These included simple ionic solids, bulk and low dimensional semiconductors, ferroelectrics, insulating and conducting magnetic materials (which require radically different experimental approaches), and wire grids for use as optical components in polarising interferometers and other far infrared applications. He has published about 225 papers on this work. 

In the UK he was a member of the committee of the Spectroscopy Group of the IOP from 1978-1987, and chair from 1983-1987. In this conference series, he has been conference chair twice in Colchester, co-chair in Cardiff, chair of the IOC from 2002 to 2005, chair of the Kenneth J Button Prize Committee for 15 years, and is chair of the 50 Year Anniversary Committee at this conference. He received a commendation from the then Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) in 1982 for developing a communication aid to enable people with lock-in syndrome (total paralysis) to operate a computer by blinking, a project unrelated to his professional work, but using techniques he had acquired along the way, a UK National Physical Laboratory Metrology Award in 1987 for proposing a method for the absolute measurement of reflectivity, and he has received the Kenneth J Button Prize and the Exceptional Service Award from this conference community.