Prof. Wilkinson has had a long term research interest into the applications of liquid crystal (LC) devices, holograms and related photonic applications. One breakthrough made recently was in algorithms which lead to the commercialisation of holographic projectors. This has lead to a highly successful company started by 3 of my students which won $26M USD. Commercial development of holographic systems is still on-going and I am looking into the design of next generation LC devices suitable for 3D holographic displays. The use of holograms has also been used for telecoms to demonstrate modal control and full mode characterisation in multimode fibres. Core to my research has been liquid crystal device fabrication and the search for the optimal materials for different applications. One of the holy grails that has eluded us so far is the fast elector-optical effect suitable to modulate the phase of the light at rates < 1mSec.