Meet Our Graduates: Claire Marvinney
Before starting as a staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the new Quantum Information Science Section, Claire Marvinney joined the lab as an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow in 2018, working first in the Quantum Information Science Group and then in the Quantum Heterostructures Group under the direction of Benjamin Lawrie. In her previous work, she was integral to the development of a millikelvin optical microscopy system in order to study superconducting devices and quantum materials at cryogenic temperatures. In her new role, Claire is developing squeezed light sources for continuous variable quantum sensing and quantum computing experiments within the Quantum Science Center (QSC) and for quantum sensing applications in high energy physics. She received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Materials Science at Vanderbilt University in the spring of 2018 under the direction of Richard Haglund studying the optical properties of ZnO nanostructures. During her Ph.D., Claire was chosen for the NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute where she did a summer of research at Northeast Normal University in China. After receiving her PhD, she worked with Josh Caldwell at Vanderbilt University Mechanical Engineering studying the mid-infrared optical properties of semiconducting materials. Outside of research, Claire volunteers within the scientific community, including as the 2020 social chair for the Oak Ridge Postdoctoral Association (ORPA) and as a member of the QSC 2021 Postdoc and Graduate Student Association where she helped to organize and moderate poster sessions and seminars. Claire also loves to explore the outdoors, which the Knoxville area is well known for, including swimming and kayaking in many local rivers, running over the hills of campus, and hiking through the Smoky Mountains.