Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop

Early life Halina Rubinsztein (later Rubinsztein-Dunlop) was born in Poland to a Jewish family. She emigrated to Sweden She moved to Australia in 1989, shortly after her marriage to engineer Gordon Dunlop. After moving to Australia in 1989, Rubinsztein-Dunlop joined the Department of Physics at the University of Queensland where she formed a research group studying laser physics. In 1995, she helped establish a Science in Action program that was used for outreach in educational programs for schools.

Rubinsztein-Dunlop was appointed Professor of Physics in 2000.

In 2016 Rubinsztein-Dunlop was made Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

During the 2018 international scientific conference SPIE, the Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation XV programme held a special session honouring Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop.

An Australian Museum Eureka Prize was awarded to the University of Queensland Optical Physics in Neuroscience team, consisting of Rubinsztein-Dunlop alongside Ethan Scott and Itia Favre-Bulle for their study of the brain and how it detects gravity and motion. The full title of the award is the 2018 UNSW Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research.

Research Rubinsztein-Dunlop conducts research that harnesses the power of optics and lasers to explore quantum and biological phenomena. She has published over 200 works in journals and books and has also been featured on radio and television. Rubinsztein-Dunlop is considered an originator of laser enhanced ionisation spectroscopy. In 2016, Rubinsztein-Dunlop, along with Tyler Neely and Guillaume Gauthier, imprinted images of Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose on a super-cold microscopic fluid, demonstrating a physics state predicted by Einstein and Bose in 1925 but first achieved in 1995. The image is approximately 0.1mm by 0.1mm in size but with a surface 100 million times colder than interstellar space.

Optical Micro-manipulation Rubinsztein-Dunlop's research in laser micro-manipulation involves the use of optical tweezers to trap objects in three dimensions and exert optical forces onto them. As she explains in her own words, "Optical tweezers act like our normal tweezers, but instead of using mechanical tweezers you are just using laser light that's highly focused: you grab something, and apply force to it to move it. What is beautiful about it is that it's a quantitative method: you can evaluate how far you move an entity and what sort of force you're applying, so you can start interrogating complex biological or solid state systems in a very precise way." In a seminal paper published in 1995 and titled "Direct Observation of Transfer of Angular Momentum to Absorptive Particles from a Laser Beam with a Phase Singularity", Rubinsztein-Dunlop's group experimentally showed the spinning of absorptive particles trapped in a singularity beam where the spin direction was controlled based on the sign of the singularity.

Biophysics Rubinsztein-Dunlop also conducts work in the field of biophysics, notably a study on vertigo and understanding the body's balance system. At the heart of this research is otoliths which are little stones in the ears. By manipulating the otoliths in zebrafish and moving them around, reactions were observed such as how the "fish moves its tail to try to compensate for the interaction with its balance system". 2011 Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics 2012 Fellow of The Optical Society 2016 Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science 2018 Officer of the Order of Australia 2021 The Optical Society C.E.K. Mees Medal "For pioneering innovations in the transfer of optical angular momentum to particles, using sculpted light for laser manipulation on atomic, nano- and microscales to generate fundamental insight and provide powerful probes to biomedicine." 2025 SPIE Gold Medal "For innovations in the transfer of optical angular momentum to matter, using sculpted light for laser manipulation on atomic, nano- and microscales, and providing a powerful probe to biomedicine."

Memberships Rubinsztein-Dunlop is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of NTT Basic Research Laboratories, Japan. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Biophotonics. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Beckmann Laser Institute. In 2012, Rubinsztein-Dunlop became a Fellow of The Optical Society for pioneering contributions in nano and micro laser manipulation in the fields of optical tweezers and atom optics with applications to biophotonics. SPIE roles: Board of Directors, Diversity and Inclusion Ad Hoc Committee, Fellows Committee, Publications Committee, Strategic Planning Committee, Symposia Committee, Symposium Chair, Conference Program Committee, Conference Chair, Symposium Committee

Personal life She is married to the engineer, Gordon Dunlop.