Rachel Angharad Oliver is a Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. She works on characterisation techniques for gallium nitride materials for light-emitting diodes and laser diodes. Early life and education Oliver studied engineering and materials science at the University of Oxford and completed an industrial placement in metallurgy. Her final year masters project was in optoelectronic materials. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford in 2003, where she began to work with gallium nitride under the supervision of Andrew Briggs. She used metalorganic vapour-phase epitaxy (MOVPE) to grow quantum dots. During her PhD, she spent several months working in an industrial lab in America. Research and career She joined the University of Cambridge in 2003 as a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 postdoctoral research fellow. In 2006 Oliver was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) at the University of Cambridge. She studied the morphology of gallium nitride light-emitting diodes (LEDs), identifying what factors controlled their efficiency and the impact of defects. She was awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant to study semi-polar nitride based structures. She was appointed a lecturer at the University of Cambridge in 2011. Oliver studies gallium nitride materials for LEDs and laser diodes. Her research considers ways to engineer the nanostructure of light emitting diodes and how this impacts macroscopic device performance. She has developed atom-probe tomography and scanning capacitance microscopy to study nitride devices. Oliver is also working on single-photon indium gallium nitride quantum dots for quantum crystallography. She has looked at the impact of threading dislocations on the quality factor of InGaN cavities. Her group developed the first blue-emitting single-photon source. She was the first to note rabi oscillations of GaN quantum dots. She designed a quasi-two-temperature growth method to pattern GaN quantum dots, which improved their emission by a factor of ten. Awards and honours Oliver was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM) in 2019. She held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from 2006 to 2011. In 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering Personal life Oliver's husband is a cardiologist with whom she has a son. References Year of birth missing (living people) Living people British materials scientists Alumni of the University of Oxford Academics of the