Jennifer Ott joined the faculty of the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as Assistant Professor in January 2025.  For Spring 2025, Dr. Ott is teaching ECE 621, Advanced Solid-State Devices.  The course will cover structure and fabrication, operating principles, state-of-the-art and novel developments of various solid-state device types used in the detection of ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, stimulated light emission, and quantum circuits.

During Jennifer's undergraduate studies of radiochemistry and inorganic chemistry at the University of Helsinki, she had already been introduced to the application of radioactive tracers and radiation detection technology for medical imaging. In search for a master’s thesis topic, she got in touch with the experimental particle physics world, and spent a summer internship at CERN in Geneva. This experience strongly reinforced her scientific interest in semiconductor detectors.

Jennifer continued to pursue a doctoral degree in Advanced Materials and Photonics under joint supervision by Helsinki Institute of Physics and Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, focusing on the fabrication of silicon pixel sensors that utilize thin films grown by atomic layer deposition as resistive and dielectric layers.

Following her thesis defense in spring 2021, Jennifer was awarded a 2-year postdoctoral scholarship by the Finnish Cultural Foundation for conducting research abroad. She moved to Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the US West coast to deepen her knowledge in precision timing sensors, as well as characterization of readout electronics. Continuing as a postdoctoral researcher after the scholarship term, she also contributes to the electrical QC of pixel modules for the upgrade of the ATLAS experiment and is active in the future ePIC and PIONEER experiments. She always enjoys interdisciplinary work, bringing together technologies and skills from different fields of STEM.