 |
Karen Kavanagh | |
|---|---|
 Kavanagh in 2013 | |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Queen's University (BSc) Cornell University (PhD) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Physicist |
| Sub-discipline | Semiconductors,nanoscience |
| Institutions | Simon Fraser University |
Karen L. Kavanagh is a professor of physics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby,British Columbia,Canada,where she heads the Kavanagh Lab,a research lab working on semiconductor nanoscience. [1]
Kavanagh obtained a BSc in Chemical-Physics from Queen's University in 1978,followed by 3 years at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa in their Advanced Technology Laboratory. She received her PhD in materials science and engineering in 1987 at Cornell University in Ithaca,New York. [2]
After post doctoral work at IBM and MIT,Kavanagh accepted a faculty position in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. at the University of California,San Diego. She has been at Simon Fraser University since 2000. [3]
Her main field of interest is electronic materials science –studying the effects of defects on the properties of semiconductor materials and devices. She has worked on strain relaxation in lattice-mismatched semiconductor heterostructures,diffusion barriers and electrical contacts for silicon and III-V semiconductor based devices,epitaxial growth and nucleation,and electron transport through thin films and interfaces. Her work on characterization tools including electron microscopy,Rutherford backscattering,x-ray diffraction,and scanning probe microscopy. [4]
She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics [5] and is the author of over 200 journal papers and conference proceedings,as shown on ORCID. [6] In 2022,Kavanagh was selected as a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS). [7]
