Karen Kavanagh

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.^[3]

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.^[4]

She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics ^[5] and is the author of over 200 journal papers and conference proceedings, as shown on ORCID.^[6] In 2022, Kavanagh was selected as a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS). ^[7]

• Vancouver YWCA Women of Distinction Award (2006)^[8]
• NSERC University Faculty Awardee (1999)^[9]
• NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991)^[10]