The KFJ Heinrich Award honors a scientist, with less than 15 years from their terminal degree, who has made distinguished technical contributions to the field of microanalysis.
Dr. Conroy is a rising star in the fields of in situ TEM and correlative microscopy. She began her career at University College Cork in Ireland, where she studied nitride thin film growth and in situ TEM at Tyndall National Institute. After earning a Ph.D. in 2015, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), eventually joining the scientific staff. In 2018, she returned to Ireland as an independent industry research fellow PI with the University of Limerick and Analog Devices Inc. In 2020, Dr. Conroy was the only Irish-based researcher to be awarded the prestigious 8-year Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which led to her permanent position as Lecturer in Functional Thin Films and Microscopy at Imperial College London and the Royce Institute.
Dr. Conroy’s research uses liquid cell and cryogenic TEM to observe atomic-scale growth and degradation of materials and interfaces related to electrical, magnetic, quantum, and energy storage devices. Her work was critical for the demonstration of ferroelectric, domain wall-based, memristor properties in LiNbO3, and she has continued to explore in situ manipulation of domain walls in other materials to enable new functional materials discovery. She and her research team often pair advanced TEM-based microanalysis with correlated APT or AFM measurements, and they are pushing boundaries for correlative cryo-TEM and cryo-APT for understanding battery and quantum materials. Dr. Conroy is an Associate Editor for Nature Communications Materials and the Journal of Microscopy. She is the Co-Director of a tri-institutional Centre of Doctoral Training in Advanced Characterisation of Materials between Imperial College London, University College London, and Trinity College Dublin, training the next generation of microanalysts and leading the UK Materials for Quantum Network Education and Outreach team.