My, Myself & I
Hello there, my name is David and welcome to my website. Here you can find my musings and find about what really makes me tick. I am very passionate about using my unique skill set and applying it to cutting edge technology to push the boundaries of what is possible in the world we live in. I love people and I love humanity and I feel indebted to the universe to live in such a beautiful, crazy, interesting world. My way of paying off this debt is to use my brain to help develop technology that will benefit mankind overall. To summarise, the heart of a hippie and the brain of a scientist.
Me in a Desert
The Origin Story
– When I was 15 my school were offering a week off of school to volunteer at a retirement community to play bingo with the guests and make them tea and the likes. While I was there I talked with the caretaker there and he asked me about school and what my favorite subjects. I was always talented and very much interested at mathematics, I have fond memories of me aged 6, asking my parents to give me two 3 digit numbers to multiply in my head while they were trying to put me to bed. I told the caretaker that I was really interested in science and in particular, space. He told me something that blew my mind, he told me electrons have only a 96% probability of being inside of the atom (not exactly true, but the idea is sound). This baffled me, perplexed my fat little 15 year old head. The next day I went to Waterstones (famous bookstore in my hometown, Cork) on Patrick’s Street, Cork and I picked up a copy of Hawking’s “A Brief History Of Time” to learn more about the seed that the caretaker planted in my head. From then on the seed grew to a great oak, as I consumed more and more pop-sci books, within a couple of months I know I wanted to study physics in university, become a physicist, discover a new theory unifying all the fundamental forces of the universe, win the Nobel prize and live in a mansion doing science for the rest of my life. Not all of that came true but you have to admire my youthful, naive ambition.
College Days
– Fast forward a few years and I begin my undergraduate degree in physics at University College Cork. To be totally frank I messed up my first year in university, I was lazy and thought it would be a walk in the park for me, boy was I wrong. I managed to scrape through the year with poor grades but that was the perfect kick up the backside I needed. I thoroughly enjoyed everything I was learning, the degree surprisingly was quite diverse skill wise, we studied circuit design, hardware interfacing, astrophysics, mathematical modeling, programming, statistics, linear algebra, multivariate calculus, quantum physics and so on. For a purely academic pursuit I was lucky to pick up many important skills along the way. For my final year project I worked on simulating InAlAs as a photovoltaic material, you can find the thesis here. I worked with researchers based in Tyndall National Institute during my study of InAlAs. I graduated in 2015 with a First Class Honours Bachelor’s of Science in Physics.
I worked briefly as an Intern in Tyndall National Insitute before I began a research Master’s Of Science there a few months later. I coninued research into the field of photovoltaics. Photovoltaics is the science of generating eletrical power from light, think solar cells. My research was into to very small GaAs based phtovoltaic power converters, half a centimeter by half a centimeter big, powered by an infrared laser. The research was unique because the device was grown on a GaAs substrate and ‘transfer printed’ to a silicon substrate. I discuss my thesis in detail in this post here. During my Master’s I worked closely with industrial partners such as Huawei and Seagate, which was very valuable experience for me. I designed the epi-structure of the device, the mask design, I developed optical test setups to charaterise my devices and I adapted the micro-transfer printing process to my devices successfully. The GaAs device achieved record open circuit voltages, something that I am proud of.