This challenge took a long time and a lot of hard work to achieve - 4 years to be exact. Despite this (or maybe because of it) this will likely be one of the challenges on this list that I will be most proud of in the years to come...

I am no longer Mr Steven Fishwick I am now Dr Steven Fishwick!

After 4 years at University studying for my bachelors/masters degrees in Microelectronics and Software Egineering the last thing I planned to do was to stay on for another 4 years to get my doctorate. I had covered a reasonable amount of maths, physics, electronics and general engineering during my undergrad studies and done pretty well so was expecting (and expected) to follow a path straight into one of the major tech companies or make the move into the world of finance. I was however offered a fully funded position at the university to study for my PhD in the emerging world of organic electronics and nanotechnology.

Many of the tech job specs that excited me the most included comments such as 'PhD preferable' and pretty much all finance positions as quants at hedge funds required a technical PhD. So this was a chance to do something interesting, increase my career prospects and most importantly for this list - get a title before my name - so I took it.

I started by investigating the uses of wide bandgap semiconductors, specifically a material called silicon carbide (SiC) which shares many properties with diamond. This semiconductor isn't limited in the same ways as silicon and is ideally suited to very high temperature and high power applications such as power transmission, sensors and military systems. The big drawback of this material is that unlike conventional silicon the surface is a bit of a mess at the atomic scale and electrically inactive silicon dioxide is not easily formed on the surface. My project was to investigate what materials could be attached to the semiconductor to provide better contacts and minimize the number of trapped electrical charges.

I started looking into how the surface of silicon and silicon carbide wafers could be modified to be smoother. I spent a lot of time perfecting cleaning and etching processes to create atomically flat wafers with minimal defects upon which I could build and characterize diodes and transistors. After getting the surfaces under control and growing silicon dioxide layers as a reference I moved onto more exotic layers which included organic molecules bonded directly to the semiconuctor surface. As my lab skills improved and I could reliably produce diodes and transistors on a range of materials I realized I was getting the most enjoyment from the chemical side of attaching the molecules to semiconductors and trying not to completely destroy them in the various metalization, etching and plasma steps required in the fabrication of microchips.

My supervisor was very progressive regarding collaborations with other departments (he was actually promoted from a lecturer in electronics to the pro-vice chancellor of research and innovation during my PhD studies) so wasn't phased by me working outside of an established research team on something very experimental.

So a new project was born. I became the founding member of Newcastle University's Molecular Electronics Group and focused my research on the electrical properties of organic molecules in electronic devices. These devices ranged from wires made out of individual strands of DNA and making diodes seperated by organic films between 6 and 20 atoms thick that could be varied with atomic precision. At the end of my first year a good friend of mine from undergraduate years, Tom Hollis, was interested in my project so came back to the univeristy to join me in researching these topics and get his PhD in the same field. I'll save you the gory details of what we found but I spent a lot of time evaporating gold onto wafers covered in various organic layers, shooting X-rays/lasers/infrared at them to work out the bonding/coverage and characterizing their electrical properties to determine the damage caused by lithography. The end result was an unhealthily large collection of atomic force microscope images of atoms, hundreds of microchips lithographically patterned into diodes and a LOT of raw date. These became my PhD thesis entitled: "Applicability of Alkyl Monolayers and DNA Templated Nanowires to Semiconductor Devices".

  

As I used my full 3 years doing the experimental part of the PhD I was faced with the prospect of doing my write-up unfunded and relying on part time jobs. As I couldn't face working in a supermarket stacking shelves, I instead relocated to London and sarted working in a leading tech company. I spent my days designing intellectual property cores for TVs and mobile phones and writing up my thesis in the evenings. A couple of drafts back and forwards with my supervisor and I submitted.

Because my thesis covered a few of different subjects - a mix of physics, organic chemistry, biology and electronics - finding a suitable external examiner wasn't the easiest of tasks. While it took a while to find one, the external examiner selected for my viva was actually very relevant and fully understood both what I'd been doing and why I'd done it - which was great. Initially I was pretty nervous as I'd heard some nightmare stories of all day cross examinations...

There were some difficult technical questions to start with but as they are just asking you to explain things you've been working on for years, it's really not that difficult. After an hour I could tell I'd passed the technical part of the viva as the tone of both examiners switched from confrontational questions designed to make you think you'd missed things to the more fluffy topics like "what would you have done differently?" and "how would you develop the project in the future?". In this more relaxed attitude it was a lot easier to talk freely about what had worked and what hadn't. About two hours in I was asked to step outside so the two examiners could talk. I felt things were going well but wasn't exactly sure what was happening and if my last answer had been bad. When I was called back in to the interview room I was greeted with smiles and a handshake - "We are pleased to inform you you have passed your viva. Congratulations Dr Fishwick". They were happy with all the content and passed me with only a couple of minor corrections (just things like typos and labelling graphs, which is pretty much as good a result as you can get since noone gets no corrections whatsoever). They were so minor that my internal examiner asked me if I could do them quickly and get them back to him later the same week, which I did. To say I was pleased was an understatement!

An electronic copy of my PhD thesis is available in my work/project pages, however reproduced here is my acknowledgements page as I really couldn't have done this item on the list without help from a few people.