Prestigious Leadership Fellowship awarded to Surrey academic
Thursday 24 September 2009
Dr Stephen Sweeney from the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) at the University of Surrey has been awarded an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship. These coveted Fellowships recognise talented researchers with the most potential to develop into the UK’s international research leaders.
The Fellowship centres on satisfying society's desire for higher performance, faster electronic and photonic technologies, such as those used in computing and communications while minimising their impact on energy and the environment. The computer processors and lasers used to drive our information infrastructure tend to have low efficiencies, are often very temperature sensitive, wasting energy as heat. Dr Sweeney’s research will examine the fundamental physical limitations of such components and develop new semiconductor technologies with much higher efficiencies and that are temperature stable. In addition this work opens up new opportunities for portable sensors, which, for example could one day be built into mobile phones for distributed environmental or medical sensing applications.
The research will be highly collaborative working with groups in North America, Europe and Asia, complementing other activities within Dr Sweeney’s group which themselves have attracted more than £1M in funding from EPSRC, NSF, TSB and industrial sources.
Dr Sweeney comments: “This Fellowship is the key step in bringing together electronics and photonics, reducing their carbon footprint, and enabling radically new technologies. The Fellowship will allow me the time and resources to drive-forward research in this area working closely with other leading groups around the world and providing the UK with a presence at the very forefront of this vital field of research.”
Professor Ravi Silva, Director of the Advanced Technology Institute, commented: “I am delighted that Stephen has been successful in gaining his Leadership Fellowship. He has built a strong group over the last few years and the award of this Fellowship would relieve him of some of his other duties to concentrate on research. I have no doubt that the abilities of Stephen and his team, with the world class facilities contained within the ATI, will give rise to a potent mix that will result in some highly successful and unique research outcomes. We are grateful to the EPSRC for this highly valuable funding scheme that allows research stars to reach their full potential."
