Dr. Eric Finch

Biography

Dr Finch has been a member since 1972 of the lecturing staff of the Physics Department, Trinity College Dublin - the last person to be appointed by E.T.S. Walton before he retired. He obtained both his primary Physics degree and his doctorate at Oxford University, then did postdoctoral work at Durham University in north-eastern England. His research is primarily into the detection of nuclear radiation - the physics of radiation detectors, and radioactivity in the environment. He has carried out research in laboratories in the UK, France and Germany as well as at Trinity. Publications include a jointly-authored textbook on radiation detectors. He has also worked in the area of radiological protection, and for five years was the Radiological Protection Officer for Trinity College. He has lectured to physics undergraduates on topics such as nuclear physics, radiation detection and other instrumentation, semiconductor devices, and electronics. He has also lectured on properties of matter, waves, light and sound to biology, earth sciences and pharmacy students, and on acoustics to music students. He has held overall responsibility for physics laboratory classes for first year students, and more recently for second year students. He was a College tutor for ten years. A Fellow of the Institute of Physics, he has been on several of their committees in Ireland and the UK. He is currently Chairman of the National Commission for the Teaching of Physics, attached to the Institute of Physics in Ireland. Both the Institute and the Royal Irish Academy have published articles of his on the life and work of E.T.S. Walton. Outside physics, he has sung in several chamber choirs with his wife, and has travelled with them through Europe and also to New Zealand.