Philip St. John Russell, FRS, (born March 25, 1953, in Belfast) is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany.
[citation needed] In 1982 he moved to the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.
[3] Russell is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the founding chair of the OSA Topical Meeting Series on Bragg Gratings, Photosensitivity and Poling in Glass.
In 2000 he won OSA's Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize for the invention of photonic crystal ("holey") fibre, which he first proposed in 1991.
In 2004 he won the Thomas Young Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics, and in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.