Professor Stuart Reid is Chair of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A physicist by training, he has spent over twenty years creating some of the most precise mirrors ever made. These mirrors sit at the heart of gravitational wave detectors, the instruments that first sensed ripples in space and time from colliding black holes. He leads the Extreme Performance in Optical Coatings testbed (EPOC) at the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland, which makes and tests advanced mirror coatings, and BRL Laser Damage Ltd in Edinburgh, which tests how much laser power optical components can withstand. He co-invented nanokicking, which gently vibrates stem cells thousands of times a second to grow new bone, and is Co-director of the Centre for the Cellular Microenvironment at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde.
