Professor Robert Hoye awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship

The Royal Academy of Engineering scheme enables Professor Hoye to work in collaboration with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for five years to develop a new X-ray detector technology from his laboratory towards commercialisation.

Seeing inside the human body with X-rays has revolutionised the provision of high-quality medical care, for example in detecting cancer. But taking an X-ray scan (e.g., CT) exposes the patient to high levels of radiation. Recently, Professor Hoye’s group showed that a material they were working on for solar cells, bismuth oxyiodide (BiOI – see the image of the crystals), was capable of detecting X-ray doses 100 times better than the current state-of-the-art detectors. This can make medical imaging safer and faster, and the project aims to scale-up this technology to realise its benefits in society.

The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is located very close to Oxford, in the Harwell campus, and is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). This project brings together the materials chemistry expertise of Professor Hoye with the device engineering capabilities of the Detector Development Group at the STFC. This project will not only push forward BiOI from demonstration devices to commercial imagers, but also strengthen the University of Oxford’s links with the STFC.

More information on the proof-of-concept work on BiOI X-ray detectors can be found here.

The Royal Academy of Engineering's Senior Research Fellow scheme builds the links between academia and business to support innovative research. Read more about the Academy's scheme here.