Prof. Rachel Oliver
How and why did you join the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride?
I first started working with the GaN Centre as a graduate student – all the way back in 2002. I was trying to grow nitride quantum structures and the growth system I was using in Oxford didn't allow me to access appropriate conditions, so my supervisor organised for me to come and spend some time growing crystals in Cambridge. Menno Kappers and I got some great results, and Prof Colin Humphreys was sufficiently impressed with our joint work that he asked me to apply for a post-doctoral fellowship to come and continue my quantum structures work after I finished my PhD. I thus joined the Centre in 2003 as a Junior Research Fellow, funded by Peterhouse and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. That meant that I was essentially working as an independent researcher right from the start, pursuing my own ideas, but I wouldn't have had enough funding to make progress if it hadn't been for support from Colin and the rest of the Centre. I've been really lucky to have that support throughout my career.
What is your role in the GaN group?
These days, my job title is "Professor of Materials Science" and I am also Director of the Centre. Hence, I’ve come a long way from being a visiting graduate student all those years ago! I have overall responsibility for the running of the Centre, including leading various projects. I try to generate ideas for new experiments or lines of research and then – and this can be the difficult bit - ensure that the required funding is in place to pursue them. I currently hold a Chair in Emerging Technologies funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering, and that buys me out of teaching, so I don’t spend much time lecturing at the moment, but I do spend a lot of time working with research students, helping them to plan their projects and understand their data. I also supervise postdoctoral scientists. I am not in the lab all that much myself anymore – the postdocs and students do most of the lab work - but I get a really good view across the science that the Centre is doing, and I can sometimes draw together strands or spot new ideas because of that.
Describe a typical day in your working life.
There’s no such thing as a typical day! One of the things that I like best about my role is the variety it brings. One day, I might be in the lab training students to use a microscope, and the next I might find myself in the offices of the Governments Department of Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, discussing how best to ensure that the UK’s expertise in semiconductors contributes to economic growth! One constant, is that I try and reserve Fridays to sit down with my students in one-to-one meetings and talk about their projects and the progress they are making, or the challenges they are encountering. Maintaining that is important to me, and I am proud to be training the leaders of the future in the semiconductor sector.
What do you like best about working in the group?
The thing I used to like best was working in the lab! These days, I most enjoy discussing data with the researchers in my team and finding new ways to analyse it. I'm perhaps quite unusual, because I really enjoy it when I come up with an idea, and other members of the team find good ways to use the data to test my idea and show me why it's flawed. That's the way we make progress! (Oh – and the group has coffee and cake together on Wednesdays. That’s great too!)
Where do you see nitrides in future?
I think the most important avenue for nitrides currently is the development of ultra-wide bandgap electronics that can handle really high powers. Increasing the efficiency of power handling electronics can really reduce the amount of energy wasted in the grid and help society make the transition to clean energy. I’m also really excited about the potential of nitrides in quantum technologies – that’s been a theme across my entire career. Lastly, I think there are lots of weird and whacky possibilities inherent in using porous nitrides as scaffolds for composites with other functional materials, and that might take us to places we never expected nitrides to go! I’m excited to see where that idea leads!