Alexander A. Balandin is a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA. His research interests include Brillouin and Raman spectroscopy, thermal transport, and electronic noise in electronic materials. He is a recipient of the MRS Medal and IEEE Pioneer of Nanotechnology Award, and a Fellow of MRS, APS, IEEE, OSA, SPIE, and AAAS. He serves as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Applied Physics Letters.
Mary Ellen Zvanut is a Professor of Physics and Graduate Program Director at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Throughout her career, her research has focused on point defects in semiconductors and insulators, particularly those pertinent to advanced technology. While early work focused on electrical characterization, most has been based on magnetic resonance studies of impurities and intrinsic defects in material systems such as the oxide layer of MOS devices and p-type GaN. For the Ultra EFRC, Dr. Zvanut will be investigating the type and number of defects in nitride films and diamond substrates grown under a variety of conditions. For example, we hope to understand how essential dopant impurities are incorporated into the lattice and which type of intrinsic defects are detrimental to a working device.
From 1996 to 1998, Marco Saraniti was a faculty research associate with the Electrical Engineering Department of Arizona State University. He joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, in 1998, where he was awarded tenure in 2004 and was promoted to the rank of full professor in June 2007. He joined the faculty of the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering of ASU in the month of August of 2007. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 publications, four book chapters and four technical reports. His current research focuses mainly on computational electronics applied to the simulation of semiconductor devices. His recent scientific work covers the following fields: the development of Monte Carlo and cellular automaton techniques for 2-D and 3-D simulation of semiconductor devices, simulation and engineering of semiconductor devices, and the development of numerical methods for the modeling of heat transport in semiconductors.
Arunima K. Singh is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University and a graduate faculty of the Materials Science and Engineering department at ASU. In the EFRC center, Singh is the co-leader of Thrust 2 and a PI of Thrust 1 and 2. Prior to joining the ASU faculty, Singh was a postdoctoral associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in the Materials Project team, from 2017-2018, and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in the Materials Genome team, from 2014-2016. She received her doctorate in 2014 from Cornell University. Her research focuses on accelerating materials discovery, synthesis, and application using first-principles computations. She is particularly interested in physical phenomena occurring at surfaces and interfaces of materials.
David Smith is Regents’ Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in Physics (1978) and D.Sc. (1988) from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He served as Director, Cambridge University High Resolution Electron Microscope (1980 to 1984) and Director, ASU Center for High Resolution Electron Microscopy (1991 to 2006), and he was President of the Microscopy Society of America in 2009. His long-term research interests have centered on the development and applications of atomic-resolution electron microscopy, with recent interest in semiconductor heterostructures and ultrawide-bandgap materials.
Kelly Woo is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University advised by Professor Srabanti Chowdhury in the WBG Lab. She received her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2020 and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2018. Her current research interest is in fabricating various high-power electronic devices based in diamond technology. Her involvement in ULTRA will focus on understanding electric breakdown phenomena and high field transport in diamond and other ultra-wide bandgap materials. These include investigating different material breakdown mechanisms, carrier saturation velocities, mobilities, and additional properties through device fabrication and electrical measurements.
Jesse Brown is currently a graduate student at Arizona State University. He received his B.S. degree in Physics at Colorado State University in 2015. His main research work is related to the growth of cubic boron nitride thin films using plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition, and the investigating of interface physics between cubic boron nitride and diamond.
Franz Alexander Koeck received his M.S. in Physics in 2003 from North Carolina State University where he started working on diamond as electronic material. His expertise lies in the development of plasma chemical vapor deposition systems for electronic grade diamond and characterization of the material and related devices. For the ULTRA project he is involved in studying the growth of doped (phosphorus, boron) diamond.
Franz Alexander Koeck recibió su M.S. en Física en 2003 de la Universidad Estatal de Carolina del Norte, donde comenzó a trabajar en diamantes como material electrónico. Su experiencia radica en el desarrollo de sistemas de deposición de vapor químico por plasma para diamantes de grado electrónico y la caracterización del material y dispositivos relacionados. Para el proyecto ULTRA, participa en el estudio del crecimiento de diamantes dopados (fósforo, boro).