Karen L. Kavanagh, Ph.D., is a professor of physics at Simon Fraser University

Simon Fraser University

Simon Fraser University is a Canadian public research university in British Columbia with its main campus on Burnaby Mountain in Burnaby, and satellite campuses in Vancouver and Surrey. The main campus in Burnaby, located from downtown Vancouver, was established in 1965 and has more than 34,000...

 in Burnaby, British Columbia

British Columbia

British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, where she heads The Kavanagh Lab, a research lab working on semiconductor nanoscience.

She obtained a B.Sc. degree in Chemical-Physics from Queen's University

Queen's University

Queen's University, , is a public research university located in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Founded on 16 October 1841, the university pre-dates the founding of Canada by 26 years. Queen's holds more more than of land throughout Ontario as well as Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex, England...

 in 1978, followed by 3 years at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa in their Advanced Technology Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering in 1987 at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 in Ithaca, New York

Ithaca, New York

The city of Ithaca, is a city in upstate New York and the county seat of Tompkins County, as well as the largest community in the Ithaca-Tompkins County metropolitan area...

. After post doctoral work at IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 and MIT, Kavanagh accepted a faculty position in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. at the University of California, San Diego

University of California, San Diego

The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

. She has been at Simon Fraser University since 2000.

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

Nucleation

Nucleation is the extremely localized budding of a distinct thermodynamic phase. Some examples of phases that may form by way of nucleation in liquids are gaseous bubbles, crystals or glassy regions. Creation of liquid droplets in saturated vapor is also characterized by nucleation...

, and electron transport through thin film

Thin film

A thin film is a layer of material ranging from fractions of a nanometer to several micrometers in thickness. Electronic semiconductor devices and optical coatings are the main applications benefiting from thin film construction....

s 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 a Fellow of the Institute of Physics

Institute of Physics

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of around 40,000....

 and is the author of over 130 journal papers and conference proceedings, as shown in the Web of Science

Web of Science

ISI Web of Knowledge is an academic citation indexing and search service, which is combined with web linking and provided by Thomson Reuters. Web of Knowledge coverage encompasses the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. It provides bibliographic content and the tools to access, analyze,...

.

Awards

• Vancouver YWCA Women of Distinction Award (2006)
• NSERC University Faculty Awardee (2000)
• NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award
  Presidential Young Investigator Award
  The Presidential Young Investigator Award was awarded by the National Science Foundation. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator Awards and Presidential Faculty Fellows Program...
  
  (1991)