Biography:Karen Kavanagh

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Short description: Canadian physicist
Karen Kavanagh
Karen Kavanagh (cropped).jpg
Kavanagh in 2013
Academic background
EducationQueen's University (BSc)
Cornell University (PhD)
Academic work
DisciplinePhysicist
Sub-disciplineSemiconductors, nanoscience
InstitutionsSimon 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]

Education

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]

Career

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.[citation needed]

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.[citation needed]

She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics[3] and is the author of over 200 journal papers and conference proceedings, as shown on ORCID.[4]

Awards

  • Vancouver YWCA Women of Distinction Award (2006)[5]
  • NSERC University Faculty Awardee (1999)[6]
  • NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991)[7]

References