Bill Stirling
Board Director
Past Director of the Institut Laue-Langevin (France); past Director of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (France)
Dr. William (Bill) Stirling has served as Director General of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and as Director of France’s Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), which is the world’s brightest neutron source and operates the largest suite of neutron beamlines. After his retirement from the ILL in 2016, he served on the Physics and Engineering working group of the EU-H2020-funded project European Research Infrastructures in the International Landscape to map the international landscape of research infrastructures, for which he was responsible for synchrotron and free electron laser sources, nuclear physics facilities, and high magnetic field laboratories. He has also advised the GIANT Innovation Campus as a scientist with the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA) in Grenoble. He has held professorships at Keele University (UK) and the University of Liverpool (UK).
Dr. Stirling has served on numerous board and advisory committees for major research infrastructure, including the ILL, the French research reactor centre (Laboratoire Léon Brillouin), the Diamond Light Source (UK), the French synchrotron radiation laboratory (Laboratoire pour l’utilisation du rayonnement électromagnétique), the Bragg Institute advisory committee (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation), the Advanced Photon Source (US), the Laboratório Nacional de Luz Síncrotron (Brazil), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US), the European Spallation Neutron Source (Sweden), and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source (UK).
Dr. Stirling is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a (Corresponding) Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Member of the American Physical Society, and has received numerous awards recognizing many contributions to British science and international science collaboration.
Dr. Stirling began his scientific career at the University of Edinburgh, conducting inelastic neutron scattering studies of the lattice dynamics of the perovskite-structure SrTiO3, using neutron instruments at Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories and at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell).