We are delighted to announce that Robinson Fellow, Professor Rachel Oliver, has been awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List for services to Materials Engineering.

Rachel says “I am delighted to receive this honour and it is vital that I acknowledge the fabulous teams that I work with both in the University of Cambridge and at Porotech, a company that spun out from my research group.  I hope I can encourage more people to get involved in semiconductors in the UK. The semiconductor ecosystem has been an exciting place to work throughout my career, but never more so than right now, with both research and industry rapidly growing and stepping up to address some of the most pressing challenges we face.”

Prof Rachel Oliver FREng is a materials engineer, inventor and spinout founder.  She is currently Director of the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride and Chief Scientific Officer of Poro Technologies Ltd. (Porotech). Her passion for understanding and engineering the small-scale structure of semiconductor materials to enable new technologies has been recognised in 2021 by her selection as an IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer and in 2023 by the award of a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies.  Rachel is an advocate for equality, diversity and inclusion in science and engineering, and has addressed the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee on these issues. She is also engaged with policy-making as a member of the Advisory Board to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Semiconductors, and was a member of the UK semiconductor strategy delegation to Washington DC in 2023. 

Please join us in congratulating Rachel.