Profile
Hannah Joyce
- Partner Investigator
- University of Cambridge
- hannah.joyce@eng.cam.ac.uk
Hannah J. Joyce is an Australian scientist and engineer, and a professor at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her research specialises in the development of new nanomaterials for applications in optoelectronics and energy harvesting. She has received several awards for her work in nanowire engineering and terahertz photonics.
Joyce studied a double undergraduate degree, receiving a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Engineering in 2005 from the University of Western Australia, specialising in pharmacology and electrical/electronic engineering.
She obtained a Ph.D. in physics from the ANU in 2010, where her research focused on the growth and characterisation of III-V semiconductor nanowires for applications in optoelectronic devices. She co-authored 22 publications during her doctoral studies.
Joyce stayed at ANU to begin her postdoctoral research until May 2010, when she joined the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. She became a lecturer at the Department of Engineering at University of Cambridge in 2013, holding a Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. In 2016, she was awarded a Starting Grant from the Uropean Research Council for her work on nitride nanowire engineering.
She is currently a professor of low-dimensional electronics at the University of Cambridge, and her research group studies the development of new nanomaterials, such as nanowires, for applications in photonic and electronic devices. She has also been a principal investigator and co-investigator on two Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grants to study multiplexed quantum devices and integrated circuits.
Joyce has co-authored more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Dr Joyce’s research aims to create nanoscale and low-dimensional components for future electronic and optoelectronic devices. These components include low-dimensional materials such as graphene, monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (e.g. monolayer MoS2) and semiconductor nanowires.
Particularly promising are semiconductor nanowires made out of III–V materials, such as GaAs, InAs, InP and AlGaAs. These nanowires typically feature diameters between 10 to 100 nm and lengths of several microns. The excellent electronic properties of these III–V materials, coupled with the tiny dimensions of the nanowire geometry, make III–V nanowires outstanding candidates for future electronic and optoelectronic devices, including light emitting diodes, lasers and solar cells.
If nanoscale materials are to be useful in future devices, we need to be able (i) to fabricate them controllably and reproducibly using techniques such as chemical vapour deposition and molecular beam epitaxy, (ii) to measure and control their fundamental optical and electronic properties, and (iii) to develop processing techniques to make functional devices. Dr Joyce’s research endeavours to grow and characterise nanowires and other low-dimensional materials, and implement novel devices, particularly solar cell devices, based on these materials.