My current research interests are in two-dimensional materials as building blocks for the next generation of electronic devices such as quantum light sources, solar cells and light emitting diodes. My research contributions are the generation and dissemination of new knowledge relating to these materials. One project now in its second round of Australian Research Council funding aims using computer simulations to discover new materials built from 2D building blocks which can then be fabricated experimentally.. The unique contribution of my research to this already active area is to use a combination of machine-learning and first principles calculations to speed up the discovery of new combinations of the many available or proposed 2D materials. A second project aims to understand single photon emission from defects in hexagonal boron nitride, and in particular to identify the defects responsible for the bright emission recently discovered by experimentalists at UTS. This is an internationally active research area where I have made contributions to our understanding of the efficacy of established methods (ie density functional theory) for calculating optical properties of defects.

I have a sustained and established track record in this field, as demonstrated by various research metrics. The quality of my research has always been consistently high and has increased in recent years as evidenced by publications in high profile journals such as Physical Review Letters (the top archival physics journal), Nature publications such as nature nanotechnology and two articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These journals are amoung the top international multidisciplinary research outlets and only publish work that has very high and broad impact. Over my career at UTS I have published more than 50% of my work in the world’s top 25 percentile of journals (taken from SciVal and using the standard SNIP based snowball metric), and more than 50% of my publications are in the top 25 percentile for publications weighted by field (SciVal snowball metric). My average citations per publication and h-index also indicate the consistent quality of my work and its impact upon the discipline.