Professor of Electronic Engineering, Bangor University

K Alan Shore was brought up in New Tredegar in the Rhymney Valley. He obtained a BA in mathematics at Jesus College, University of Oxford and a PhD at ( the then ) University College, Cardiff . His PhD, sponsored by British Telecom Research Laboratories, concerned the semiconductor laser which introduced him to the field of Photonics in which he has continued to undertake research for some 45 years.  He has held academic positions at the Universities of Liverpool and Bath  and, in 1995, was appointed to his present position of Professor of Electronic Engineering, at Bangor University. At Bangor he has been Head of the School of Informatics and of the College of Physical and Applied Sciences. He has also held visiting research positions in Australia, Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the US and has had productive research collaborations in Argentina, China and India as well as many countries in Europe.

In 1987 he co-founded and, until 2012 was the Organiser and Programme Committee Chair for the  international conference on Semiconductor and Integrated Optoelectronics  (SIOE) held annually in Cardiff,. He has been a programme member for several OSA conferences and was a co-organiser of a Rank Prize Symposium on Nonlinear Dynamics in Lasers  held in the Lake District, UK in August 2002. He chaired the IEEE/SPIE Education and Training in Optics and Photonics (ETOP) conference held in Technium OpTIC, St Asaph ,2009.

From 2001 to 2008 he was the Director of  ‘Industrial and Commercial Optoelectronics’ (ICON) a Welsh Development Agency Centre of Excellence. Between 2006 and 2008 he was Chair of the Welsh Optoelectronics Forum and has  chaired the Photonics Academy for Wales since its establishment in 2005. From 2008-2011 he was chair of the Quantum Electronics Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. In 2015 he led activities in Wales for the UN ‘International Year of Light’. He chaired the Science and Technology Committee for the 2017 National Eisteddfod of Wales.  He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Physics. 

As General Secretary of the Learned Society of Wales he aims to raise awareness of the Society’s activities and expertise both nationally and internationally.