Professor Stuart J. C. Irvine

            Stuart Irvine was appointed to the Chair of Opto-electronic Materials Chemistry in the Chemistry Department at the University of Wales Bangor in August 2000.  This chair is partly sponsored by the Welsh Development Agency (WDA) to promote the development of the world class Opto-electronics Cluster in North Wales.  The research activities cover various aspects of chemical vapour deposition of semiconductor and oxide materials for applications such as solar cells, wavelength selective detectors and displays.  Particular interests lie in the aspects of deposition kinetics and photo-catalytic mechanisms.  This research has led to the development of new optical in situ monitoring devices to measure growth rate, layers thickness and roughening of the growing films.  This research has led to the spin out of a successful company ORS Ltd (http://www.ors-ltd.com) and is based at the OpTIC Technium in St Asaph.  The value of awarded grants to Professor Irvine’s group over the past two years has been in excess of £1M.  All the grants and studentships have industrial collaboration and industrial sponsorship in addition to the EPSRC funding.

Professor Irvine’s previous appointment was as Chair of Materials Chemistry at North East Wales Institute (NEWI) from October 1993 which was funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) research quality initiative.

From 1990 to 1993 Professor Irvine was an Assistant Manager, Array Producibility Research at Rockwell International Science Center in Thousand Oaks, California. He developed metal organic vapour phase epitaxy (MOVPE) for infrared detector applications carrying out novel research using new substrates.    Previously, during 12 years at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment he was the first to demonstrate the growth of the infrared detector material, mercury cadmium telluride (MCT), using MOVPE and also pioneered photo-assisted epitaxy for growth at low temperatures.  He invented the interdiffused multilayer process (IMP) for the growth of compositionally uniform alloy layers, which is now a recognised technique worldwide and is in production in the UK. 

            Professor Irvine is a Chartered Physicist and received his B.Sc degree in Physics from Loughborough University of Technology in 1974, Ph.D in Physical Metallurgy and Science of Materials in 1978 , and D.Sc in Physics in 1994, both from the University of Birmingham.  He has published over 130 refereed papers and book chapters and has seven patents in the area of semiconductor materials growth.  He is Fellow of the Institute of Physics, member of Materials Research Society, past chairman of the British Association for Crystal Growth (BACG) and member of the American Association for Crystal Growth (AACG). Professor Irvine was chairman of the Welsh Opto-Electronics Forum (WOF), 1998-2000, and was a member of the EPSRC Functional Materials College and Renewable and New Energy Technology Panel 1999-2001. He was a UK representative at the G8 Energy conference, organised by UKERC in Oxford, May 2005.  Current responsibilities also include Co-ordination of the EPSRC Network on Photovoltaic Materials and Devices, project manager for the EPSRC funded collaboration “PV SUPERGEN”, a founder director and Chairman of ORS Ltd and associate editor for the Journal of Materials Science: Electronic Materials.