Andrew Briggs is Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. He is Fellow of St Anne’s College, Fellow of Wolfson College, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, and Member of International Society for Science and Religion and Academia Europaea.

Briggs has a degree in Physics from Oxford, and a PhD in Physics and a degree in Theology from Cambridge. He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, and he holds a current Private Pilot Licence. He has led several interdisciplinary projects, with major industrial sponsorship from companies such as BNFL, Toppan, Hitachi, and Hewlett-Packard. From 2002 – 2009 he held an EPSRC Professorial Research Fellowship, and was Director of the Quantum Information Processing Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration. Since 2010 he has been responsible for proposals to Templeton World Charity Foundation. He has over 575 publications, with more than 12,500 citations. His forthcoming book with Roger Wagner is Ultimate Curiosity – A History of God-Driven Science. He received the Holliday Prize, Institute of Materials, 1984, and the Metrology award for World Class Manufacturing, 1999. His early research at Oxford pioneered acoustic microscopy for materials characterisation. With the invention of scanning tunnelling microscopy he studied surface properties at ever higher resolution, including semiconductor quantum dots during growth and defects in oxides. Following a sabbatical at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, he developed carbon and molecular materials for quantum computing. His research interests now focus on nanomaterials in which the spin states can be harnessed for quantum technologies, and their incorporation into practical devices.