Karen Kavanagh

Canadian physicist

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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]

## Education[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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

## References[edit]

1. ^ "Kavanagh Lab". Simon Fraser University. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
2. ^ "Karen Kavanagh, Professor". Department of Physics. Simon Fraser University. Archived from the original on 1 December 2013. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
3. ^ "Karen L. Kavanagh". Physics. American Physical Society. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
4. ^ ORCID. "Karen L. Kavanagh (0000-0002-3059-7528)". orcid.org. Retrieved 9 February 2021.
5. ^ "Kavanagh a woman of distinction". Simon Fraser University. 15 June 2006. Retrieved 5 November 2014.
6. ^ "SF News - May 20, 1999 - 100 per cent success rate in NSERC awards". www.sfu.ca. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
7. ^ "Presidential Young Investigator Award: Kavanagh, Karen". Grantome. Retrieved 5 November 2014.

Authority control databases

International|

* ISNI
* VIAF

Academics|

* ORCID
* Scopus