Profile - Deputy Director

Qualifications:
MSc (a gold medal) in Physics, Kharkov National University, Ukraine, (1981);
PhD (Physics), Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering, Ukraine (1984)

Current appointment:
Head and Professor, Nonlinear Physics Group, Director’s Unit, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University (2001-present)

Employment history:
Research Fellow (1993-1995), Senior Research Fellow (1995-1999),
Professor (1999-present), Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University;
Alexander-von Humbold Research Fellow, University of Düsseldorf, Germany (1991-1993)

Major awards:
Medal and the First Prize of the National Academy of the Ukraine (1989);
Pnevmatikos International Award for Research in Nonlinear Phenomena (1995);
Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics.(1996);
Pawsey Medal of the Australian Academy of Science (1998);
Fellow of the Optical Society of America (2000);
Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (2001);
Federation Fellow (2002)

Professional Association:
Adviser, 2003 Fitzroy Dearborn Encyclopedia in Nonlinear Science (2001-present),
Guest Editor, Focus issue “Nonlinear Localized Modes: Fundamental Concepts and Applications”, CHAOS: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (2001-present),
Guest Editor, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics on Nonlinear Optics (2001-2002);
Advisory Board Member, CHAOS: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (2000-present);
Associate Editor, Physical Review E (1999-present),
Editorial Board Member, Physical Review (1998-1999).

Expertise:
During last 15 years, Professor Yuri Kivshar has been working on various problems of nonlinear guided-wave optics, including the study of solitary waves, optical self-trapping effects, soliton interaction, and nonlinear all-optical switching. More recent research of Prof. Kivshar has shifted towards the theory of nonlinear photonic crystals, photonic-crystal circuits, and optical composite materials with nonlinear properties.

Yuri Kivshar has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of self-trapping effects in optics, nonlinear instabilities, nonlinear waves in nonintegrable systems, and the fundamental concepts of all-optical data processing and communications. Yuri Kivshar’s main contributions to the fields of nonlinear physics and photonics include, in particular, the pioneering results in the physics of optical solitons and vortices, including the world-first prediction and experimental verification of a number of novel types of solitary waves; stability theory of nonlinear waves and the comprehensive theory of the symmetry-breaking and transverse instabilities of nonlinear waves, including the first analysis and experimental observation of the breaking of dark solitons into optical vortices (the effect recently observed in other fields such as Bose-Einstein condensates); the first prediction of the nonlinearity-induced suppression of the Anderson localisation in nonlinear disordered systems (later confirmed experimentally); the pioneering results on nonlinear localised modes in discrete and periodic nonlinear systems, including the first prediction of modulational instability in nonlinear lattices, wave localisation in discrete media, the concepts of the nonlinearity-induced gap and lattice gap solitons, self-trapping in nonlinear photonic crystals, and nonlinear switching in photonic-crystal circuits.

Yuri Kivshar’s work has been widely recognized in Australia and overseas, and he is very highly cited in the scientific community. According to the data recently published by the ISI Essential Science, Yuri Kivshar is one of “Most Cited Scientists in Physics” with, for example, more than 3000 citations only to the papers he published during last 10 years. He is an author of 4 out of 10 most cited papers in physics ever published by scientists of the Australian National University