Sara Henda

Currently in my final year of PhD in quantum Optics at the University of St Andrews, I am a motivated candidate aspiring to use my skills in industry.

Most of my professional experience was acquired during my PhD, where I had hands-on experience in clean-room fabrication using e-beam evaporator and thermal evaporator, as well as dektak and ellipsometry. I handled my experiments in an optics lab where I set the optical table and thus had to design the path and align the lasers. I have experience with room temperature spectroscopy and cryogenic spectroscopy, where we had to work with helium dewers to cool our sample in the cryostat.

Moreover, I also synthesised the material we worked with and fabricated the thin film. I have also worked on Python pipelines and different coding for analysing large data and for simulation.

As for my second most relevant experience, it would be during my 3-month master's project, where I used Zemax optical studio to design a neurophotonic device consisting of multiple emitting points along a tapered optical fibre. During this project, I gained significant experience in optical design and modelling using Zemax and Matlab data analysis.

My most relevant education is my PhD in physics, where I worked on quantum optics. My project consists of studying the optoelectronic properties of different 2D perovskites and the strong coupling inside a microcavity. I worked mainly in an optics lab, testing the devices for different parameters and optimising the system.

During my PhD, I collaborated with various teams and acquired a range of transferable skills, in addition to my scientific skills, including teamwork, project management, organisation, attention to detail, and initiative-taking.