Keynote Speakers

These are the confirmed plenary speakers for the conference

Professor John A. Rogers
North-western University

Talk title: Growth, Assembly and Integration of  Semiconductor Nanomaterials: From Bio-Integrated Electronics to Large Area Micro-LED Displays

Professor John A. Rogers obtained BA and BS degrees in chemistry and in physics from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1989.  From MIT, he received SM degrees in physics and in chemistry in 1992 and the PhD degree in physical chemistry in 1995.  From 1995 to 1997, Rogers was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University.  He joined Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff in the Condensed Matter Physics Research Department in 1997, and served as Director of this department from the end of 2000 to 2002.  He then spent thirteen years on the faculty at University of Illinois, most recently as the Swanlund Chair Professor and Director of the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory.  In 2016, he joined Northwestern University as the Simpson/Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, with joint appointments in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and h.  He is founding Director of the newly endowed Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics.  His research has been recognized by many awards including a MacArthur Fellowship (2009), the Lemelson-MIT Prize (2011) and the Smithsonian Award for American Ingenuity in the Physical Sciences (2013).  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Prof. Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres
Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Talk title: Nanophononics: pushing a frontier in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

ICREA Research Prof. Dr Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres was awarded her PhD in Physics in 1984 by the University of Manchester (UK). She then held tenured academic appointments at the universities of St. Andrews and Glasgow also in the UK, before becoming a C4 professor at Universität Wuppertal (Germany) in 1996. She was a research professor at the Tyndall National Institute, University College Cork (Ireland) from 2004 to 2008. Since May 2007 she has been an ICREA Research Professor based at the ICN2.

She has received awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Nuffield Foundation, as well as an Amelia Earhart Fellowship from ZONTA International (USA). She is the author of over 470 scientific publications and has edited/co‐edited six books (Researcher ID; E‐8418‐2010, Hirsch index 40, over 6900 citations). She leads a strong team working on phonon engineering and is actively engaged in European research. She serves in scientific advisory committees on nanoscience and nanotechnology in Grenoble and Paris‐Saclay. She is a member of the Board of Stakeholders of Photonic21, represents the ICN2 in the Nanoelectronics ECSEL Joint Undertaking and is a visiting professor at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH) in Sweden. She is also currently serving as deputy chair of the Advisory Group for the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme.

Prof. Deirdre M. O’Carroll
Rutgers University and Trinity College Dublin

Talk title: Metasurfaces for Light Management in Semiconductor Thin Films.

Deirdre O’Carroll is currently an Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and Chemistry at Rutgers University where she leads a research group working in the areas of nanophotonics and organic optoelectronics. She obtained her B.E. (Elec. Eng., 2002) and PhD (Microelectronics, 2008) at University College Cork and the Tyndall National Institute, Ireland. Prior to joining Rutgers in 2011, she conducted postdoctoral research in plasmonics at California Institute of Technology in the US and at the University of Strasbourg and CNRS in France. She has received numerous awards for her research including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2016), an American Chemical Society Young Investigator Award in Polymer Material Science and Engineering (2017) and a Science Foundation Ireland Future Research Leaders Award (2018). She has published 46 peer-reviewed journal publications in the areas of nanophotonics, organic optoelectronic materials, plasmonics and nanotechnology.

Professor Rong Chen
Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Talk title: Strategies for area selective atomic layer deposition and applications in catalysis

Professor Rong Chen obtained her BS degrees in materials science and engineering from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2001. From Stanford, she received the mater degrees in electrical engineering and the PhD degree in physical chemistry in 2006. From 2006 to 2011, Rong was a senior researcher in Applied Materials, Inc. for a year and then joined Intel Labs Santa Clara as a senior research scientist. In 2011, she joined Huazhong University of Science and Technology as the professor of Mechanical Engineering, with joint appointments in school of optics and electronic information. Her current research interests are selective atomic layer deposition for applications in catalysis, optoelectronics, and sensors. Her research has been recognized by many awards such as the Simon Karecki award of Semiconductor Research Association (2006), the China Overseas innovation talents contribution award (2016). She is also the recipient of “Young and middle-aged leading scientists, engineers and innovators” (2015) and “Chief scientist of youth 973 program” (2013), both by ministry of science and technology of China; “the Recruitment Program of Global Young Experts” (2011) by Central Organization Department of CPC; “New Century Excellent Talents” (2009) by the Ministry of Education of China.

Professor Debdeep Jena
Cornell University

Talk title: Gallium nitride based nanoscale devices: What’s new and why is it exciting?

Debdeep Jena received the B. Tech. degree with a major in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2003. His research and teaching interests are in the MBE growth and device applications of quantum semiconductorheterostructures (currently III-V nitride semiconductors), investigation of charge transport in nanostructured semiconducting materials such as graphene, nanowires and nanocrystals, and their device applications, and in the theory of charge, heat, and spin transport in nanomaterials. He is the author on several journal publications, including articles in Science, Physical Review Letters, and Electron Device Letters among others. He has received two best student paper awards in 2000 and 2002 for his Ph.D. dissertation research, the NSF CAREER award in 2007, and the Joyce award for excellence in undergraduate teaching in 2010.

Professor Gary Rubloff
University of Maryland

Talk title: From Nanostructures to Mesoscale Architectures: Electrochemical Storage for Smart Things

Gary W. Rubloff  (www.rubloffgroup.umd.edu) is Distinguished University Professor and Minta Martin Professor of Engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD), with primary appointments in Materials Science and Engineering, the Institute for Systems Research, and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics. Following his PhD in physics at U. Chicago and a postdoc at Brown U., he held research and research management positions at IBM Research Yorktown Heights in Physical Sciences, Silicon Technology, and Manufacturing Research, where his leadership in ultraclean integrated semiconductor processing and diagnostics led to his receipt of the AVS Gaede-Langmuir Prize in 2000. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Vacuum Society.

During 1993-1996 he was Associate Director of  the Center for Advanced Electronic Materials Processing at NCSU and Professor in ECE. He joined UMD in 1996, where he served as Director of the Institute for Systems Research, an NSF Engineering Research Center, until 2001.  He has served as the founding Director of the Maryland NanoCenter (www.nanocenter.umd.edu) since 2004.  In 2009 he led the creation of Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage (www.efrc.umd.edu), a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center, where he currently serves as Director.  He has served on the DOE Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) since 2013 and participated and led a variety of BESAC activities.

Professor Rubloff has published over 280 papers and holds 26 U.S. patents, with research including surface and solid state science, electronic materials and processing, real-time sensing/metrology and advanced process control, biofabrication and biomicrosystems for metabolic engineering and biological signaling, nanoscale processes and atomic layer deposition, and multicomponent multifunctional nanostructures for energy applications.