Advent calendar - December 5th- Anouk Goossens

In the Zernike Institute Advent Calendar, we are presenting 24 short spotlights in December. In these specials, we highlight PhD students, postdocs, support staff and technicians of our research groups and team - providing a glimpse in their typical day at work. In Episode 5 meet Anouk Goossens , PhD student in the Spintronics of Functional Materials group of Prof. Tamalika Banerjee and part of CogniGron.

One of the most critical challenges we are faced with today is how to deal with the ever-growing storage and processing of big data. It is clear that improving the current hardware is not a viable option and a drastic change is needed. I, along with other researchers from CogniGron are looking at the human brain for inspiration. This biological system is capable of outperforming state-of-the-art supercomputers in terms of energy and volume and hence, we want to create devices that can emulate its unique architecture. In this respect, I am searching for materials that can exhibit a similar kind of learning.

I am a PhD researcher in the Spintronics of Functional Materials group under the supervision of Prof. Tamalika Banerjee. Our group focuses on new approaches to create and manipulate spin and charge transport across device interfaces with complex oxides. These materials are highly tunable by electrical and magnetic stimuli and my research focuses on how designing devices in which we can store information in their resistance states.

One of the perquisites of being part of CogniGron is that I have the opportunity to work together with researchers from different disciplines and I greatly enjoy regular discussions with collaborators in computer science and artificial intelligence. While a large part of my time goes into device fabrication, collecting experimental data and understanding the underlying physical mechanisms, I am also encouraged to analyse and discuss my results from a different perspective. This is a challenge, but through reading and eventually writing papers on a diverse range of topics I feel I have learned a lot!

Contact: Anouk Goossens