Clivia obtained her PhD in Physics (Manchester Univ., UK 1984). She held tenured appointments at St. Andrews and Glasgow Universities and became a C4 professor at Wuppertal Univ. (Germany 1996). During 2004-8 she was a research professor at Univ. College Cork, Tyndall National Institute (Ireland). Since 2007 she is at ICN2 and heads a 17-strong team working on phonon engineering and nanofabrication. Clivia received awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Nuffield Foundation and an Amelia Earhart Fellowship from ZONTA International (USA).  She is author of over 560 scientific papers, of which 515 are indexed (ORCID, WoS, Researcher ID: E-8418-2010, Publons), has an h-index of 49 and over 9500 citations. She edited six books on low dimensional structures and nanofabrication. She was a guest professor at the P. Sabatier Univ. Toulouse and at KTH in Sweden. Since 2020 she is member of the Academia Europaea.

Research interests

Her group investigates new concepts for multi-state variables based on the engineered interactions of phonons with photons, electrons and magnons, in device-like structures. One particular interest is thermal transport at the nanoscale to address heat dissipation in nanoelectronics, the role of phonons in noise and dissipation in nano-scale systems. Another strand is Si-based opto-mechanics for phonon-based information processing.  Our experimental research is anchored in novel nanofabrication methods including dimensional and defectivity metrology. The most recent project (LEIT) is a five-year endeavour starting in January 2021, funded by an ERC AdG to demonstrate dissipationless information transmission by phonons. During 2020 we made considerable progress in experimental topological photonics and synchronisation in optomechanical circuits.