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Kieran O’Brien
Kieran graduated with a PhD in Astronomy from the University of St. Andrews in 2000. He spent 7 years as a Staff Astronomer at ESO baed at the VLT in Chile, where he was Instrument Scientist for the FORS spectrographs. In 2009, he moved to UCSB where he began working with Kinetic Inductance Detectors in Prof. Ben Mazin’s Lab. He was involved in the first on-sky demonstration of MKIDs for optical astronomy while at UCSB and has continued to collaborate strongly with the UCSB group. He moved to Oxford University, where he was involved in the development of the HARMONI spectrographs for the ESO ELT before finally moving to Durham in 2017. He is now building a group focussing on developing MKID instrumentation.
Deli Geng
Deli is a senior sofware engineer working on the read-out system for MKIDs. This system is common to all MKID applications and uses the latest generation of field-programable gate arrays (FPGAs) to read-out large arrays of MKIDs using software-defined radio (SDR).
Aurelie Magniez
Aurelie is an STFC-funded PhD student working on developing an ultrafast wave-front sensor for extreme adaptive optics. This will use the MKIDs energy resolution and photon counting capabilities to enable new modes of observations for future high contrast imaging instruments, such as PCS on the ESO ELT.
Jeremi Grabas
Jeremi is an EPSRC-funded PhD student working on applications for MKIDs in microscopy and the life sciences. These will be some of the first applications outside of astronomy.
Meryem Kubra DAG
Meryem is a PhD student funded by the Department of Physics at Durham University. Her research focuses on the application of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) to time-domain observational astronomy, with an emphasis on spectroscopic applications.