Biography
Sam Stranks (@samstranks) is Professor of Optoelectronics and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology and a Cavendish Joint Member in the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and an elected Fellow of both the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Physics.
Research
Research in the Optoelectronic Materials and Device Spectroscopy Group (StranksLab) focuses on the optical and electronic properties of emerging semiconductor systems in order to control the absorption or emission of light and/or manipulate the transport and recombination of energised charge carriers in these materials. Our work finds a number of applications including photovoltaics for energy, X-Ray detectors for medical imaging and LEDs and lasers for light emission. We develop optical spectroscopic techniques to assess the optoelectronic quality of materials and relate these characteristics directly to their chemical, material, morphological and structural properties through multimodal measurements. We employ a number of cutting edge techniques to monitor the photophysics of full devices under operating conditions with high spatial and temporal resolution. Through these approaches, we can make new fundamental scientific discoveries as well as construct optimised devices in which we push efficiencies to their theoretical limits. Our developed devices and in-situ and operando imaging approaches are applicable to a range of fields including energy materials, medical imaging and biological systems.
Our group generally covers four main areas, which comprise our research sub-groups. These themes are highly cross-cutting and facilitate collaborations between our physicists, chemists, materials scientists and engineers. You can read more about recent activities and techniques within each sub-group at the links below. Most projects in the group fall within one or several of these categories, making these pages a good resource for prospective applicants to understand the activities in the group.
- Materials Synthesis and Characterisation: Broadly covering materials chemistry synthesis and materials characterisation including diffraction and electron microscopy
- Spectroscopy: Broadly covering optical spectroscopy (time-resolved and steady-state), both macroscopic and microscopic
- Light Harvesting: Broadly covering light harvesting devices including solar cells and photodetectors.
- Light Emission: Broadly covering light emission systems and devices including light emitting diodes and lasers.
