Critics attributed White's involvement with the centre as a contributing factor to Cambridge's silence over the Chinese government's increasing encroachment on academic freedom in the late 2010s.

He accepted a salary that was about half of his predecessor's, a move praised by student and staff unions as a positive development in tackling excessive pay gaps in academia.

[10][11] Ian White has built up a substantial research activity in the field of optoelectronics and optical communications and his team numbers approximately 45 people publishing on average 60 papers a year.

Highlights of his research have included: the development of the first all-optical laser diode flip-flop, the first negative chirp electroabsorption modulator and the invention of a technique for transmitting radio frequency signals over long distances of multimode optical fibre.

Several of these advances have already made commercial impact, the offset launch technique for enhancing the bandwidth of optical fibre links having already been adopted within Gigabit Ethernet standard.