Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Physics, University of Cambridge, England, 2013
  • M.Sci., Physics, University of Nottingham, UK, 2009
Professional Affiliations
  • IEEE, Senior Member (#93621352)

Dr. Pooley's expertise is in semiconductor physics, quantum optics, and information science. His research background involves the development of semiconductor technology for quantum computing, and he has extensive experience designing, fabricating, characterizing, and modeling optoelectronic devices.

He provides a range of professional technical services to clients including:

  • Scientific support for legal activities, such as Intellectual Property matters, International Arbitration, and other litigation.
  • Failure analysis relating to semiconductor electronics, optical devices, optoelectronics and display technology, and digital control systems.
  • Advanced image processing, thermal (IR) imaging, and optical measurement techniques.
  • Numerical analysis, such as Finite Element Modeling, for engineering and product design matters.
  • Technical advice relating to software development and data analytics.
  • Providing objective scientific advice to senior management executives of a startup company.

Prior to joining Exponent, Dr. Pooley worked as a Software Developer for COMSOL Multiphysics, creating tools to model established consumer products such as transistors, LED lighting, photodiodes, and photovoltaic cells. He also has significant hands-on experience of semiconductor fabrication and processing techniques in a cleanroom environment, including: sample cleaning and preparation, wafer cleaving, photolithography, metal deposition, etching, and device bonding/packaging.

Dr. Pooley completed his Ph.D. in the Semiconductor Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, UK, in conjunction with Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. His work involved a range of novel experiments that led to 7 publications in respected journals. In addition to his semiconductor fabrication skills, he has extensive experience in a range of spectroscopy, optical measurement, and material characterization techniques including, photoluminescence (PL), micro-PL, electro-PL, time-resolved PL, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), photon correlation measurements such as HBT and HOM interferometry, atomic force microscope (AFM) imaging, and scanning tunneling microscope (STM) imaging. He also has a strong background in scientific programming and numerical simulation methods, and has developed systems for automatic data acquisition and processing, such as a piezo feedback system to stabilize alignment in optical measurements with long acquisition times, and analysis tools for easily extracting figures of merit from large data sets using fits to mathematical models.