Karen Kavanagh | |
|---|---|
.jpg) 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.[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]
