Philipp Kukura


Philipp Kukura FRS FRSC is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He is best known for pioneering contributions to femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy, interferometric scattering microscopy and the development of mass photometry.

Education and early life

He was born in Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia in a family of Slovak actor Juraj Kukura. In 1984 the family emigrated to Germany. In 2002 he graduated with a Master of Chemistry from the University of Oxford and competed in the 2001 and 2002 Rugby League Varsity matches. In 2006 he completed his PhD in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley College of Chemistry.

Career and research

After completing his PhD, Philipp Kukura moved to Zürich. There he worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral research assistant under the supervision of Professor Vahid Sandoghdar on nano-optics until 2010. He returned to Oxford in 2010 to work initially as an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow. In 2011 he was elected to a tutorial fellowship at Exeter College. In 2016 he was promoted to Full Professor of Chemistry.
In 2018 Philipp Kukura founded Refeyn Ltd. together with Justin Benesch, Daniel Cole, and Gavin Young to commercialise mass photometry.

Selected publications

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Honours and awards