Honorary Fellows: Professor David Birch
For championing UK spin-outs and physics in the support of multidisciplinary research as founding chairman of leading fluorescence instrumentation manufacturer HORIBA Jobin Yvon IBH, one of the earliest spin-out companies in Scotland.
Professor David Birch is a pioneering university entrepreneur. Aged 27 he cofounded IBH in 1977 to commercialise and build a market around what was then the embryonic and specialised research technique of fluorescence lifetime measurement.
IBH was the University of Strathclyde’s first spin-out, one of the earliest in Scotland and the longest-established company in the field today. From early beginnings licensing designs and software, Birch led IBH’s growth as a manufacturer and its merger with HORIBA in 2003 to become the present-day market leader in fluorescence spectroscopy.
The legacy of IBH’s initiation and leading products created secure jobs and made Scotland the global hub for fluorescence lifetime products, with around 90% export. These instruments have societal impact across many disciplines including the molecular science that underpins healthcare and the physics of semiconductor technologies.
For more than 40 years Birch combined a dual role greater than the sum of the parts of a university academic and company director. Although more common now, this synergistic and visionary approach helped him to serve as a role model. He pursued university research, winning major funding and contributing more than 300 publications alongside shaping IBH’s customer-centric business strategy incorporating user-friendly instruments, teaching workshops, collaboration and sponsorship.
Birch’s physics PhD at the University of Manchester in 1975 sowed the seeds for success when he developed a fluorescence lifetime spectrometer with novel features destined to become industry standards. These included the all-metal coaxial nanosecond flashlamp, which eliminated radio frequency interference problems on fluorescence decays and helped open the field to non-specialists.
He then gained experience of the analytical instrument market working for VG Micromass on organic mass spectrometry before joining Strathclyde as a lecturer in 1978, becoming Head of Physics (2004-2010), during which time he helped launch the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance research pool.
Concurrently Birch led IBH’s trailblazing with application-focused innovations that enhanced capabilities within the multiple disciplines which use fluorescence. These included pulsed ultraviolet LEDs, application-specific integrated circuits and multiplexed time-correlated single-photon counting, leading to the FLIMera camera, which won the IOP 2019 Business Innovation Award. Previously IBH won SMART, SPUR, John Logie Baird and Millennium awards for innovation.
Serving on IOP Publishing boards for 25 years, and through time as Editor-in-Chief of Measurement Science and Technology and founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Methods and Applications in Fluorescence, Birch helped attract multidisciplinary submissions and industry sponsorship.
Birch won the IOP Dennis Gabor Medal in 2020 and the HORIBA lifetime achievement award in 2017. He held Visiting Chairs in Madras, Kyoto, Prague and Texas, and research fellowships from the Royal Society, the Nuffield Foundation and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Chemistry and Edinburgh.