Emeritus Professor Dorothy Duffy

Emeritus Professor Dorothy Duffy is a retired Professor of Physics at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCL, where her former group employs modelling methods to study a diverse range of materials and processes, including crystallisation, radiation effects in metals and semiconductors, novel domain structures in ferroelectrics and stress in nanoparticles.

Dorothy still retains her Project interest in the “Additive Directed Crystal Growth” task.  Soluble additives are one of the most important means of controlling the growth of crystals, as they influence morphologies, size and size distributions or, alternatively, they inhibit unwanted crystallisation.  Certain additives can also become incorporated within crystals, providing a novel route for modifying properties and functionality.  The Group employs a range of modelling methods (molecular dynamics, rare event methods, kinetic Monte Carlo) to investigate the fundamental role additives play in controlling growth and collaborating closely with experimental colleagues to develop models that provide unique insight into the processes that dominate the experimental outcomes.  The aim is to generate a new framework for understanding additive-directed crystal growth, which will ultimately enable us to make informed choices about additives and reaction conditions that will deliver crystals with the desired properties.