Ravi Silva is the Director of the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) and heads the Nano-Electronics Centre (NEC), which is an interdisciplinary research activity. The NEC has over 50 research staff. He joined Surrey in 1995. Ravi's secondary education was in Sri Lanka, after which he joined the Eng. Dept. at Cambridge Univ. for his undergraduate and postgraduate work.
His research has resulted in over 330 presentations at international conferences, and over 320 journal papers.
In 2002 he was awarded the Charles Vernon Boys Medal by the Inst. of Physics, and in 2003 he was awarded the IEE Achievement Award by the Inst. of Elec. Engineers.
In 2003 he was also awarded the Albert Einstein Silver Medal and Javed Husain Prize by UNESCO for contributions to electronic devices.
In 2003 the largest EPSRC Portfolio award for £6.68M was made to Prof. Silva and his team on Integrated Electronics, which was followed in 2004 by a SRIF award for £4M to set up a Nano-Electronics Centre for multidisciplinary research.
In 2005, the Nano-Electronics Centre was a finalist in the Emerging Technologies category of the IEE 2005 Awards for Innovation in Engineering.
In 2007, Prof. Silva was the runner-up of the "Times Higher Education Young Scientist of the Year", and "Most Entrepreneurial Scientist 2007, United Kingdom", by UKSEC and Science Alliance of the Netherlands. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2007.
In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK.
Prof. Silva was on the advisory board of Imprimatur Ltd and the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) of Sri Lanka. He spent the year 2008 acting as an Advisor to the Honourable Minister of Science and Technology in Sri Lanka Institute of NanoTechnology (SLINTec) and the Nano-Science Park and Centre, NANCO (private) Ltd. He acts as an advisor to both these activities and is on the director's board.
Prof. Silva was also a member of the Electrical and Electronic Panel (UoA24) for the recently concluded Research Assessment Exercise 2008 (RAE2008), EPSRC Nanotechnology Task Force and currently sits on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's (EPSRC) Technology Opportunities Panel (TOP).
His research interest encompass a wide range of activities. Nano-Electronics and renewables being two themes that are very important to the whole effort.
In addition to Nano-Electronics, the characterisation, growth and processing of novel semiconductor materials for large area electronic applications is central to the group activity. Novel device structures & physic of carbon nanotubes and photovoltaics based on polymer/nanotube composites, electron field emission from amorphous materials and modelling of the emission, photovoltaics, electroluminescent cells, electronic doping of amorphous carbon, Excimer laser annealing and ablation, disordered (amorphous and n-C) GaN for optoelectronic applications, band gap modulated superlattice structures, diamond and SiC thin film deposition, the use of ion implantation for electronic doping and synthesis of novel materials are some of his other interests.
Research is progressing rapidly on growth kinetics of low temperature carbon nanotubes.
Research collaborations are in progress with national and international partners both from academia and industry. We are also part of the 40 member international consortium on Nano-bio sensors under the EU Framework 6 programme Sensation. We are also part of the 10 member UK academic network on Carbon Based Electronics National Consortium sponsored by EPSRC.