Dr Olena Shaforost joined NPL in October 2022 as a Senior Scientist in the Quantum Technologies Department. She is working on the development of microwave resonators for materials scanning methods for electrical property measurements and also for the neutrino mass measurement project (QTNM) where the microwave resonators are required for cyclotron resonance of single beta-decay electrons.
Dr Shaforost received her MSc degree of Engineer-Physicist-Researcher in Cryogenic Physics and Technology from Kharkiv State Polytechnical University, Department of Physics and Engineering, Ukraine. Then she worked as Engineer and Junior Researcher in the Institute of Radio physics and Electronics NASU, Kharkov, Ukraine.
She moved to Germany and received her PhD award from Technical University of Dortmund; the experimental work was completed in Julich Research Center in 2009. Her PhD Thesis Title was “Microwave whispering-gallery resonators for nanolitre liquid sensing”. She moved to the UK and started to work as Research Associate at Imperial College London since 2011. She has contributed to the establishment of graphene activities in the Department of Materials and developed fabrication steps for graphene, improving the chemical vapour deposition equipment. Olena has designed dielectric resonators operating in the TE01δ mode to obtain sheet resistance values of fabricated graphene for quality control and for other 2D materials. Olena was involved in the European project EMRP Metrology for NEMS as REG researcher. She focused on the development of graphene freestanding nano structures for detection of smallest displacements. Further EPSRC projects enabled development and optimization of graphene field effect devices for COVID-19 testing. The same system can be used for testing other biomarkers, for example cancer exosomes (funded by Cancer Research UK) and dementia markers.