Dr Robert Oliver

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Lecturer in Sustainable Materials

Profile photo of Dr Robert Oliver
Profile picture of Profile photo of Dr Robert Oliver
robert.oliver@sheffield.ac.uk

Full contact details

Dr Robert Oliver
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Sir Robert Hadfield Building
Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
Profile

Robbie is a Lecturer in Sustainable Materials in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Robbie is interested in studying materials that have the potential to mitigate the effects of climate change, especially through developing more efficient solar energy generation.  To achieve this goal, his research focuses on understanding the interplay between the photophysics, device physics and materials properties of novel semiconducting materials with an emphasis on metal halide perovskites.

Robbie received his MPhys in Physics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 2018. Following this, Robbie was at St Anne's College, Oxford where he conducted his DPhil studies under the supervision of Prof Henry Snaith FRS and Prof Michael Johnston, defending his thesis entitled "Interfaces in Metal Halide Perovskite Photovoltaics" in 2022. Robbie won the prestigious MRS Graduate Student Award in 2022 for the quality of his DPhil work. In 2022, Robbie moved to the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheffield where his postdoctoral work studying the influence of strong light-matter coupling on the photophysics of organic materials was supervised by Dr Jenny Clark and Prof Julia Weinstein. In October 2023, Robbie began his Lectureship in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield.

Research interests

Robbie's group studies the interplay between the photophysics of semiconductors and their performance in full devices. The group uses fundamental understanding from spectroscopic studies to rationally design strategies to improve materials and hence the device performance. This means the research encompasses materials fabrication (spin coating, thermal evaporation, etc.) and characterisation (x-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, etc), to spectroscopy (photoluminescence quantum yield, time-correlated single photon counting, etc.) to full device fabrication and characterisation.

Publications

Journal articles

Conference proceedings papers