Advent calendar - December 2nd- Teodor Zaharia

In the Zernike Institute Advent Calendar, we are presenting 24 short spotlights in December. In these specials, we highlight PhD students, postdocs, support staff and technicians of our research groups and team - providing a glimpse in their typical day at work. In Episode 2 meet Teodor Zaharia, research technician in the Photophysics & OptoElectronics group.

I am a Research Technician working in the Photophysics & Optoelectronics group since 2016. My passion for technics started from a young age, as my father (a Professor of Mechanical Engineering) had as a hobby to dismantle the engine of our car, inspect it and fix parts. I was always required to join and help with little jobs. I was not very pleased at that time, but eventually it caught on me and later came in very handy!

I am originally trained as a physicist with a Masters degree in plasma physics and a PhD degree in nanotechnology and plasma – surface interactions. I followed my education with a couple of postdoctoral positions in the UK and here in the Netherlands. Once I realized that an academic career does not suit me, I switched to technical support staff.

I really love my job as a technician as every day is never the same. My job requires a mixture of administrative skills – inquiring about products and ordering them, technical skills - maintaining the equipment in our labs in good condition, and personal skills – supporting the students with their experiments and the overall progress within their programme. Among the other tasks I am responsible in our group are chemical waste management/collection and performing experiments and analysis with an optical technique called ellipsometry.

My daily routine starts with switching on my computer, checking if any orders came in and distributing them to the appropriate people in our group. After that I do a tour of the labs and the new cleanroom to check if any of our many gloveboxes are misbehaving or if any other small problems need to be fixed. If everything is under control, I make a plan together with my colleague about the pending tasks of the day that we need to solve. On many occasions I don’t even get to task number two, because some emergency requires our immediate attention!

Apart from my work at Zernike Institute, I enjoy spending time with my family, going on hiking holidays in the mountains of Europe or just lay on the beach and listen to the waves. I am an avid sports consumer (Formula 1, football and snooker) and I try to practice several sports myself: I regularly go running and play tennis, and less often I enjoy going swimming or playing football with colleagues.