Dr. Boon Kok Tan

Boon Kok Tan was born in a small town(Taiping) in Malaysia. At the age of 17, he was selected to become already an undergraduate student at the University of Technology Malaysia, due to his exceptional school performance. After completing the Bachelor degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2001, he was offered a postgraduate position in Solar Engineering, and was awarded the Master degree in 2002. Following a lecturing career at Tunku Abdul Rahman University in Kuala Lumpur, he was offered a D. Phil position – funded by the prestigious King of Malaysia awards – at Oxford Astrophysics to work on the development of quantum limited coherent detectors for submillimetre astronomy. B. K. Tan obtained the D. Phil degree at Oxford in 2012. He is currently a member the Millimetre Detectors group of Oxford Astrophysics, leading the development of coherent THz detectors for the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA).

Boon Kok Tanʼs thesis describes the development of receiver technologies for sub-millimetre astronomy instruments, focusing on high performance coherent cryogenic detectors operating close to the superconductor gap frequency. The mixer receiver developed in his thesis work contributed novel ideas in all three major parts of Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor (SIS) mixers. These novel detector systems pave the way into high performance THz mixers, which will have a strong impact on sub-millimetre wave astronomy.

The PhD thesis of Boon Kok Tan was carried out at the Department of Physics and Astrophysics of the University of Oxford between October 2007 and June 2012, under the supervision of Dr. Ghassan Yassin.