Associate Professor David Powell

I am an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW Canberra. I work on metamaterials, structured materials with unusual electromagnetic and acoustic properties. I have expertise in microwave, acoustic and terahertz experiments, particularly in the field of nonlinear and tunable metamaterials. I am a member of the Advanced Electromagnetics group.

Publications and Profile

My Google Scholar Profile contains the most up to date list of all my research publications

Background

I obtained my PhD from RMIT University in 2006, in the field of surface acoustic wave biosensors. From 2006-2017 I was a Researcher with the Nonlinear Physics Centre of the Australian National University, where I conducted research on fundamental and applied aspects of metamaterials, operating in the microwave, terahertz, infra-red and acoustic domains. Since 2017 I have been a Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW Canberra.

My research has demonstrated several new forms of nonlinear metamaterials, and a number of unique tuning mechanisms for reconfiguration of metamaterial functionality. A strong area of interest is metamaterials which combine electromagnetic and mechanical degrees of freedom to yield new coupled dynamics. I have made theoretical contributions to the phenomena of bianisotropy and chirality. I have contributed to the understanding modes in open resonant systems such as metamaterials, having released an open-source code called OpenModes, for finding the modes of open electromagnetic structures with strong radiation losses.

Keywords

Metamaterials, electromagnetism, nanophotonics, computational electromagnetics, microwaves, millimetre waves, acoustics, nonlinear, tunable, active structures