As per experts, less than 10% of the academic research finding are considered transferable to industries. While breakthroughs often originate in academia, the process and efforts of transferring these advancements into industries are challenging and time taking. Being an Early Stage Researcher, I express my gratitude to PERSEPHONe MSCA-ITN for providing me the opportunity to bridge the gap between industry and academia, fostering scientific developments towards bringing an advancement in detection technology and raising the overall Technology Readiness level (TRL) for “Perovskite based sensors for Ionizing Radiation Sensing”.

Currently, I am working as an ESR( Early Stage Researcher) at DECTRIS Ltd. while pursuing my doctoral studies at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Professor Maksym V. Kovalenko. My work could be broadly defined as ‘Sensor Development’, with focus of exploring novel Lead (Pb)-Free Metal-Halide semiconductors materials for X-ray radiation sensing application.

The current X-ray detectors employed for sensing high energy X-ray (above 50keV) are limited to CdTe, which involves toxic elements, high cost, synthesis & fabrication complexity, and polarization issues. Novel Cd and Pb-free Metal-Halide materials not only possess desired properties like high ‘attenuation coefficient’, excellent ‘mobility-lifetime product’ but also provide an environmentally sustainable alternative.

With formal education in Material Chemistry, I enjoy being regularly pushed to learn various aspects of Material Science, Chemical Engineering, Process Engineering and Semiconductor Physics as my overall work spans from synthesis of novel chemical compositions, crystal growth, fundamental characterization, wafer process developments, readout-integration and analysis of X-ray detection characteristics. Thanks to my diverse and experienced team at ETH and DECTRIS which helps me navigate through the challenges in the above phases of the sensor development, where we often learn with shared experiences.

 Through my journey, I have learned that identifying, addressing and defining of the ‘problem’, ‘effective communication’ and ‘quality feedback’ together form foundations of scientific development. The nature of the project help me acquire project management skills in both domains of industry and academics, especially delivering in constrains of time. I believe that designing a correct scheme of experiments to draw important conclusions is an important skill to master in the latter.

In addition to the research realm, I have always found solace in science communication. Moreover, I aspire to contribute towards ‘transparency in publication reviewing’ , ‘accessibility of research articles’, ‘improving scientific ethics’ and ‘equal opportunities to all genders’.

“One never fails because learning is an accomplishment”