Alison B. Walker

Alison Bridget Walker is a physicist who is a professor at the University of Bath. Her research considers computational modelling of printed electronic devices and the development of perovskite solar cells. She is best known for her work on the Kinetic Monte Carlo method.

Early life and education Walker was born in Sarawak. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research considered nuclear quadrupole interactions and fast ionic conductors. After earning her doctorate, Walker moved to the United States, where she joined Michigan State University as a postdoctoral fellow. She moved to the Daresbury Laboratory as a research fellow.

Research and career Walker started her independent scientific career at the University of East Anglia. She joined the University of Bath in 1998, where she was awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship to work at Cambridge Display Technology. In 2013 Walker was made Academic Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in New and Sustainable Photovoltaics, as well as co-leading the University of Bath SuperSolar network.

Walker has worked with Petra Cameron to investigate perovskite solar cells, hybrid devices that contain organic and inorganic materials. The active layers of these devices contain perovskite crystal structures, which strongly absorb solar radiation. Electrons within the perovskite are excited across the material bandgap, creating mobile charge carriers that migrate to electron and hole transport layers. Walker was made coordinator of the Horizon 2020 program making perovskite truly exploitable (Maestro). Walker has created protein simulations to understand the structure and function of biologically-relevant molecules.

Selected publications