Ashley builds instruments that must work unattended in the worst environment on Earth: the PLATO and related autonomous observatories on the Antarctic plateau (Dome A/C), where he characterised the site's exceptional infrared background, seeing and atmospheric stability, and built the power, thermal and control systems needed for a telescope to survive a polar winter with no human present. He also works on low-noise infrared detectors and on CubeSat instrumentation. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — the discipline here — making a low-noise detector work reliably outside a controlled laboratory, with a hard power and thermal budget — is the same one that separates a benchtop pT/sqrt(Hz) magnetometer from a deployable one, and it is a skill set the quantum sensing field is short of. Borderline inclusion under the astronomy criterion; kept because the sensor and its environment are the entire object of study.

Barry works on the detection of the 21-cm signal from the Epoch of Reionisation with the Murchison Widefield Array and, prospectively, SKA-Low. Her specialty is calibration systematics: she has shown how small errors in the sky and beam model propagate into spectral structure that mimics or swamps the cosmological signal, and has developed the diagnostic and mitigation framework that current MWA upper limits rest on. This is a measurement whose entire difficulty is instrumental. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — the intellectual structure is identical to a hard magnetometry measurement: raw sensitivity is adequate, and everything depends on understanding correlated, instrument-induced systematics well enough to subtract them below the signal. Early-career PI (DECRA). Borderline astronomy inclusion, kept on the systematics/instrument criterion.

Buscher leads optical/infrared astronomical interferometry research at the Cavendish, co-leading COAST and serving as System Architect for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) in New Mexico. Current work focuses on MROI science-combiner instrumentation, fringe tracking, and light source/alignment systems for the beam train. He also holds an EPSRC grant (with Haniff and Young) on machining metre-sized gratings with nanometre precision for ELT high-resolution spectrographs. He is President of the Scientific Council of the European Interferometry Initiative.

Chantler's group is built around the idea that X-ray measurements can be made accurate, not just precise: the X-ray Extended Range Technique (XERT) delivers absolute absorption coefficients at the 0.02 per cent level, which in turn allows XAFS to be used for quantitative structure determination and allows high-accuracy tests of atomic theory. The second thread is precision X-ray spectroscopy of highly charged ions and exotic atoms as a test of bound-state QED, where discrepancies between theory and experiment remain unresolved. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — this is precision measurement at the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum: the methodological common ground with pT/sqrt(Hz) NV ensemble sensing is the obsessive treatment of systematics and absolute calibration that separates a sensitive measurement from an accurate one. Borderline inclusion, kept because the group's core competency is metrology rather than X-ray applications.

Combes is a theorist of continuous quantum measurement, quantum trajectories, quantum-limited amplification and quantum filtering, with a strong record of working directly alongside superconducting-circuit and optical experiments rather than in isolation. Recent directions include the fundamental limits of amplifier-based sensing, error-corrected and adaptive metrology protocols, and characterisation/verification of noisy quantum devices. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — his work supplies the estimation-theoretic scaffolding — quantum Fisher information, back-action limits, adaptive protocols — that determines whether an NV ensemble running DEER or nanoscale NMR at pT/sqrt(Hz) is actually operating at its fundamental bound or leaving sensitivity on the table. Theory PI, but explicitly experiment-facing.

de Lera Acedo heads the Cavendish Radio Astronomy and Cosmology group and is PI of the REACH experiment, a global 21-cm signal radiometer deployed in the Karoo desert, South Africa, targeting detection of the redshifted hydrogen signal from the Cosmic Dawn (z≈7.5–28). He has a PDRA opening for 21-cm cosmology data analysis. Research spans novel antenna design, ultra-low-noise receiver calibration (achieving ~80 mK RMSE), Bayesian foreground modelling, and RFI mitigation. He also leads the CosmoCube space mission concept for lunar-orbit 21-cm observations and is active in SKA development and HERA. He is actively hiring postdocs (PDRA posting live in 2025).

De Sterke is a theorist-experimentalist of nonlinear and structured photonics. The group's signature recent contribution is the pure-quartic soliton: by engineering the dispersion of a waveguide so that the group velocity depends on the third power of frequency, they produce solitons with a different energy-width scaling from conventional ones, with direct consequences for mode-locked laser and frequency-comb design. The group also works on topological and non-Hermitian photonics and on THz metamaterials. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — the relevance is to the light side of the search rather than the spin side: dispersion-engineered comb and soliton sources are the local oscillators and reference clocks that any optical readout of a pT/sqrt(Hz) sensor ultimately depends on. Borderline inclusion; kept for the fundamental-light-physics criterion.

Foot leads the Ultracold Quantum Matter group and is one of the two Oxford physics PIs co-leading the AION project at Oxford. His group develops laser-cooled strontium atom sources with the ultranarrow Sr-87 clock transition for large-scale single-photon atom interferometry. Near-term goals include the AION-10, a 10-m baseline vertical atom interferometer currently under construction in the Beecroft Building stairwell, targeting dark matter searches and mid-band gravitational wave detection. Foot's group also studies non-equilibrium 2D quantum gas physics (BKT transition, vortex dynamics) using matter-wave interferometry. AION is linked to MAGIS-100 at Fermilab.

Fruth is an experimentalist on LZ, the world-leading liquid-xenon dark matter experiment, and works on the detector-physics end: electron and single-photon backgrounds, calibration, and the characterisation of the anomalous low-energy events that currently limit sensitivity at the bottom of the energy spectrum. The programme is a pure exercise in pushing a detector's noise floor down until it is limited by irreducible physics (the neutrino fog). Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — dark matter detection and NV-ensemble magnetometry are the same problem in different clothing — an exquisitely quiet detector, a signal below the background, and a systematics budget that determines everything — and the quantum-sensing community is increasingly supplying the readout technology (quantum-limited amplifiers, single-photon counters) that these experiments now need. Early-career PI.

Garrido is a computational cognitive neuroscientist — predictive coding, Bayesian brain models, neuroimaging biomarkers for mental health — who was appointed a chief investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Quantum Biotechnology specifically to work with the Melbourne and UQ physics groups on non-invasive quantum-sensor recording of human brain magnetic fields. She is the human-subject and source-reconstruction end of the QUBIC portable-brain-imager programme: her lab supplies the paradigms, the clinical cohorts and the inverse-problem modelling that a diamond- or OPM-based MEG system has to serve. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — she is not a sensor developer, but she is the reason the pT/sqrt(Hz)-class magnetometers being built at Melbourne have a human-trials pathway at all. Preferred attributes present in strength: bioelectromagnetism and human trials with novel quantum technologies. Included as a deliberate borderline case — a sensing postdoc would be the physics half of a collaboration with this lab, not a member of it.