About Me

You can see more about who I am and my family on my bio page. Briefly, I'm originally from England, where I grew up in London. My parents were born-and-bred Londoners but have retired to Ludlow, a small English town on the edge of Wales. I have one sister, Emma, who lives in Farnham Common, West of London.

I have been married for several years, now. I met my wife, Oliya when I was working in California. She is actually Russian and born in Moscow, but emigrated to California, which was a good job, otherwise I would never have met her! We got married in Sept. 2001 in Ludlow.

She likes to travel, particularly to hot places, such as Crete, Malaysia and Fiji. After two years in Britain, I persuaded her to sample Britain's delights. You can see her here on a rock, by a waterfall in Yorkshire. She developed a particular fondness for Highland cattle while in Scotland. You can see pictures of the many places we have been together on our pictures pages. More recently, Oliya has taken over the hobby of keeping picture pages up to date, and her page of picture albums can be found Picasa.

We have spent many years (about 4 in total) living in Tsukuba, Japan, where I was working at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in the International Centre for Young Scientists(ICYS). Here we are together at the shrine on Mt. Tsukuba, the mountain that gives the town its name. We went there for a visit with my host researcher and his wife, who go there every year in January to buy some good luck for the coming year.

The new addition to the Owen family

On March 27th, 2007, my wife gave birth to our son, Alexander at the Baby Healthy clinic near Tsukuba, in Japan. His full name is Alexander George Todor Owen. Alexander works in both Russian and English, we both liked George (and I had a great-uncle George), and Todor is a name from Oliya's family. There is a (growing!) page of pictures of Alexander on our pictures pages. If you want a short movie, look here and here.
Soon after we arrived in Geneva, we drove to England for a few days, in order to collect furniture for our apartment in Geneva. (That was a long trip - 1200 km each way. We did it in 14 hours outward, and took two days coming back.) We stayed in Ludlow for two days, so my parents got their glimpse of their grandson, as did several neighbours. While there, we visited my grandfather, who lives North of Ludlow in Church Stretton. He was very surprised to see us, as we hadn't told him we were in England. He was overjoyed to meet Alexander for the first time. We took a picture of four generations of Owens for posterity. (Click the picture for a bigger version.)

What do I do?

I work as a research scientist. My career has taken me all over the world, from America to Japan, and now Switzerland. I did my first degree, a B.A. in Metallurgy and Materials Science at Oxford University. Materials Science is an interesting hybrid of physics, chemistry and engineering, with some other things in the middle, which can't really be described under those headings, which is what makes it so much fun. When it came to my 4th-year project, I chose to learn about the fundamentals of surfaces, in particular the silicon (001) surface using a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope(STM). With an STM, you can image individual atoms, and observe how they react on an atomic scale. After my first degree, I stayed on for 3 years to do my DPhil (1993-96). A DPhil is the same as a PhD, except that we call it something different in Oxford. I have been doing research at the atomic scale ever since, so what I do might be described as nanotechnology, but really it is still Materials Science.

I have been doing research now for about a decade, during which time I have looked at epitaxial growth of silicon and the diffusion of individual hydrogen atoms for my DPhil. In 1996, I moved to California, where I worked on the growth of III-V semiconductors (InAs, AlSb), which are used in other electronic applications, and learnt how to operate an MBE system, and learnt to grow thin films of semiconductors, one atomic layer at a time. From there, I moved to Japan, to work on Bismuth nanolines, back to Oxford and carbon nanotubes and fullerenes, and back to Japan to pursue my interest in nanowires. In Geneva, I have taken this research in a slightly different direction, with the emphasis squarely on single atomic chains, which form on the templates well below room temperature. Since arrival, we have commissioned a new STM which operates down to 4 K, and we are learning how to grow single atomic chains of Au, Cu, and other metals on the templates. More details of my research can be found here along with a copy of my CV and a list of my papers.