Dr Stephen Church
School of Science, Engineering & Environment
Current positions
Lecturer
Biography
Dr Church is a Lecturer in Physics and is part of the Materials and Physics research group based in the School of Science Engineering and Environment at the University of Salford (UoS).
Dr Church was awarded his MPhys degree at the University of Manchester (UoM) and remained in Manchester to join the research group of Prof. David Binks and Prof. Philip Dawson to study for his PhD, working in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for GaN and Cardiff University. He defended his thesis in 2019, which was entitled “Optical studies of zincblende GaN-based semiconductors”, focussing on improving the efficiency of LEDs for lighting and display applications. Dr Church continued to work on the project as a Research Associate until October 2020 and retains strong links to the micro-LED industry through consultancy work, protected IP and industrial projects.
In 2020, Dr Church joined the research group of Dr Patrick Parkinson, at UoM, as a Research Associate on the “Big Data for Nanoelectronics” project. In this work, he developed a world-leading facility for automated high-throughput micro-photoluminescence characterisation of nanoscale optoelectronics. This facility studies 100,000s of samples from international academic and industrial researchers and has been recognised through rewards from the Rank Prize fund and the Institute of Physics.
In 2024, Dr Church was awarded an Early Career fellowship, by the Leverhulme trust, to expand his high-throughput research into the exciting field of Quantum 2.0, specifically novel Single Photon Sources, which are a fundamental building block of the next generation of photonic computers and communications networks. The project is entitled “Scaling up room temperature single-photon sources”, and predominately explores the use of defects in wide bandgap semiconductors for this purpose.
In 2025 Dr Church Joined the University of Salford as a Lecturer in Physics, where he continues his research into photonic quantum technologies and scaling up nanoscale photon sources.
Areas of Research
Nanoscale photon sources for Quantum Technologies
-NV- centres in nanodiamonds
-Defects in III-Nitride materials
-Epitaxial quantum dots
-Single photon imaging
MicroLEDs and on-chip light sources
-Carrier dynamics, optical polarisation and recombination efficiency
-Electronic and photonic correlative microscopy
-III/V micro-scale optoelectronics
Automated microscopy and instrumentation
-Micro-photoluminescence and single-pixel imaging
-Open data for novel materials
Qualifications
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PhD in Photon Physics
2015 - 2019