Karen Kavanagh

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This biographical article or section is written like a résumé.
Please help improve it by revising it to be neutral and encyclopedic. (December 2007)

This article does not cite any references or sources. (June 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

This article lacks information on the notability of the subject matter.
Please help improve this article by providing context for a general audience, especially in the lead section. (June 2007)

Karen L. Kavanagh teaches physics at Simon Fraser University.

She obtained a B.Sc. degree 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 then moved to graduate school at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY receiving her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering in 1987. 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.

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. She has expertise in a variety of characterization tools including electron microscopy, Rutherford backscattering, x-ray diffraction, and scanning probe microscopies.

She is the author of 80 journal papers and conference proceedings.