Prof. Pam A. Thomas
Research Interests
Non-linear optical materials; ferroelectrics, X-ray crystallography.
Background
Professor Pam Thomas has been a member of staff in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick since 1990 and a full professor since 2005. She was educated at Oxford University, where she took an BA (Hons) in Physics and a DPhil on the subject of Optical Activity in Crystals in the Physical Crystallography Group of the Clarendon Laboratory. Following a period as a Research Fellow at the Clarendon Laboratory, she moved to Warwick in 1990 to found and head the Ferroelectrics and Crystallography Group, which is part of the larger Condensed Matter Physics activity in the Department.
Pam is also responsible for the strategy and running of the inter-departmental X-ray Diffraction Facility within Physics. This has benefitted enormously from investment under the project Advanced Materials 1: Creating and Characterising Next-Generation Materials, supported by Advantage West Midlands and the European Regional Development Fund under the Birmingham Science City initiative. Pam is an expert on the structure and related properties of ferroelectric, piezoelectric and nonlinear optical crystals, ceramics and thin-films. She has an extensive publication record on perovskites and related materials (e.g. PZT, BaTiO3, Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3, LiNbO3, LiTaO3) and on the members of the KTiOPO4 (KTP) family of materials as well as a host of papers on the application of novel x-ray and optical techniques to a range of functional materials from gallium nitride to carbon nanotubes.
She is a frequent user of central facilities including synchrotron radiation at ESRF (France) and Diamond (UK) and neutron diffraction at ILL (France) and ISIS (UK). Pam is a member of the Commission of Inorganic and Mineralogical Crystallography for the IUCr, vice-chair of the Condensed Matter Physics division of IUPAP and Conference Chair for XTOP2010, the international conference on High-resolution X-ray Diffraction and Imaging, which will be held at the University of Warwick in September 2010 (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/XTOP2010).
Since October 1st 2010, Pam has also been the Director of the Science City Research Alliance for the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick in addition to her role as a research professor at Warwick.
Write to:
Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL
Contact Details:
Office: MAS 3.02
Telephone:
+44 (0)2476523354
Fax:
+44 (0)2476150897
E-Mail:
P.A.Thomas@warwick.ac.uk
