Dr Matthew Coak

Matt Coak received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2017 as a member of the Quantum Matter group at the Cavendish Laboratory, under the supervision of Montu Saxena. Following this he worked as a postdoc at the IBS Center for Correlated Electron Systems at Seoul National University under Prof Je-Geun Park. In early 2019 he took up a second postdoctoral position at the University of Warwick, then in 2022 he started a senior postdoc position at the London Centre for Nanotechnology working on quantum computing technologies.

Later this summer he will be taking up a lectureship position at the University of Birmingham and setting up an
extreme-conditions group investigating the role of dimensionality in 2D magnetic materials.

A specialist in high-pressure experimental techniques and instrumentation development, his research interests have spanned from quantum criticality in ferroelectrics, low dimensional magnetism and metal-insulator transitions in van-der-Waals systems, to molecular framework magnets. These projects have encompassed magnetisation, transport, dielectric constant, x-ray diffraction and neutron scattering measurements, all under extreme pressure. His work on tuning the dimensionality of 2D van-der-Waals materials via pressure has uncovered a variety of novel electronic and magnetic states and transitions in the increasingly studied TMPS₃ family of compounds.