Our CDT PGR Tom Collier, now in his final year, sucessfully bid for a CDT summer student bursary in early 2018. The “learning by doing” scheme provided an opportunity for all third years to hone their grant writing scheme and take a chance on one of three bursaries that would cover a small stipend and project fees to host an undergraduate for 10 weeks.
A few months later we are now able to harvest the fruit of this labour: research progress, an inspired undergraduate, and a PhD student who gained experience in application writing and supervision.
That’s what Tom reported back from the experience:
My undergraduate student, Andy Wild, successfully completed a 10-week summer research project with the CDT. His results were accepted as a poster presentation in the first European conference on Smart Nanomaterials (SNAIA2018) held in Paris in December 2018, being the only undergraduate student to do so in the entire conference. His poster garnered much interest both due to his excellent work and attitude, and due to its pole position in front of the bottles of wine and complimentary croissants.
Andy’s research focused on semiconductor quantum rings, exceptionally tiny doughnut-shaped blobs 10,000th the width of a human hair. He theoretically investigated the effects of placing one such ring between a pair of electrostatic gates, which could be the building block of a range of opto-electronic devices – spanning from quantum information processing to THz radiation applications.
It is hoped his completed work will be published in a peer-reviewed journal, and Andy would like to continue his academic journey in the forms of a PhD in Exeter. The experiences he gained during his CDT summer project, resulting in his first international conference, will be invaluable as he commences his academic career. In addition, visiting Paris during the heated moments of the Gilet Jaunes movement gave him first hand cultural experience of the French in full revolution-mode, très français.
What also happened…
Charlie-Ray Mann won the student poster prize at the SNAIA 2018: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/xm2news/snaia-2018/
