National Epitaxy Facility Virtual Open Day & ECR event

We are excited to announce we are holding the first National Epitaxy Facility (NEF) Virtual Open Day and Early Career Researcher (ECR) event on Monday 13th April 2026. 

The NEF Virtual Open Day will be from 10:00 – 12:30 and is a great opportunity for our existing and potential users to gain an insight into the Facility. It includes a Live Virtual Tour of our Sheffield cleanroom, and presentations from our manager and growers, covering Facility Access Routes, and epitaxial capabilities available. We also encourage any relevant industry representatives to join us for this part of the day to better understand how we operate and what our future needs are.

The ECR event will be held from 13:30 – 16:30 with inspiring talks from leading semiconductor experts in academia and industry, focussing on different career pathways with tips on how to be successful. We particularly encourage PhD students, post-docs, and other ECRs both in industry and academia to attend this part of the day.

Both events are free to attend. Each session has a separate registration (via the Eventbrite links below), but we welcome attendance for the whole day. Please see the agenda below:

NEF Virtual Open Day

  • 10:00 – 10:15 – Overview of the NEF (Dr Zofia Bishop)
  • 10:15 – 11:00 – Virtual Tour of the Sheffield Cleanroom inc. Q&A
  • 11:00 – 12:15 – Presentations from NEF Research Staff:
    • 11.00 – 11.15 Sheffield MBE (Dr Edmund Clarke)
    • 11.15 – 11.30 UCL MBE (Dr Hui Jia)
    • 11.30 – 11.45 Sheffield MOVPE (Dr Elisa Sala)
    • 11.45 – 12.00 Cambridge MOVPE (Dr Menno Kappers)
    • 12.00 – 12.15 Micro-transfer printing and characterization at Sheffield (Dr Paul Fry)
  • 12:15 – 12:30 – Q&A
sign up here

ECR event 

  • 13:30 – 14:15 – Fellowship Application Journey – Dr Edmund Harbord, University of Bristol
  • 14:15 – 15:00 – Grant Writing for Success – Prof Jon Heffernan, National Epitaxy Facility, University of Sheffield
  • 15:00 – 15:45 – Transition from Academia to Industry – Dr Ofogh Tizno, Lumentum Technology
  • 15:45 – 16:30 – Start-up Founding – Dr Lata Sahonta, Kubos Semiconductors
  • 16:30 – Close
sign up here

Both events will be held fully online on Google Meet, the link for which will be emailed out a few days prior to the event to those that have registered. 

If you have any questions, please contact: epitaxyfacility@sheffield.ac.uk

We look forward to virtually welcoming a broad range of our users, ECRs, and the wider semiconductor community to our Facility on Monday 13th April.