BIN-RDI Researchers and Industry Affiliates

The BIN-RDI comrpises the following principal investigators:

Dr. Glenn Alers is currently with the department of Physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His research interests include nanostructured photovoltaics using atomic layer deposition, solution based CdTe solar cells and electrical characterization. In 2009 he was a visiting scientist in the solar module reliability group at NREL. He was a principal engineer and senior process manager at Novellus  Systems from 2000 to 2007 working on integration and reliability issues associated with copper / low k interconnects. While at Novellus Systems, he published 14 refereed papers on copper / low k interconnects, gave 10 tutorials or invited talks at major conferences and was a member of the management committee for the IEEE Reliability Physics Symposium. He was responsible for electrical testing, reliability testing, yield improvement and FIB/SEM characterization within the integration group. Prior to Novellus Systems, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill for seven years working on reliability issues for silicon based circuits including electromigration, thin gate oxide reliability and high-k dielectrics. He received his PhD in 1991 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and was a Research Associate in the Physics Department of Michigan State University for two years. He has published over 50 papers in refereed journals and has received 19 US patents.

Dr. Sue A. Carter, received her BA in physics, chemistry and mathematics from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan and her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago.  She was a postdoctoral researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies) in Murray Hill, New Jersey and a research fellow at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.  She is current a Professor of Physics at University of California, Santa Cruz.  Over the last 15 years, her research has focused on the electronic, magnetic, thermal and optical properties of inorganic, organic and biological materials.  Currently, she is studying the application of nanostructured materials to next generation energy technologies, including solid state lighting, solar cells, photoelectrochemical cells and sensors. She has published over 50 articles in the above areas, has organized several conferences for the APS, MRS and SPIE, and has given dozens of invited talks in the areas of organic electronics, metal oxides, and renewable energy technologies. She served as the chief technical advisor for Add-vision, charting their technology pathway for developing fully printed OLED lamps.  She is currently on the scientific advisory board for Solexant, a solar cell start-up company, as well as a technical advisor for Add-vision. She is a recipient of the 1996 Packard Fellowship and a 1995 CPIMA Young Investigator Fellowship.

Dr. Bin Chen is an associate adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering. Her research interests includes (1) Materials synthesis and characterizations of carbon nanotubes, carbon nanotube polymer composites, graphane, metal and compound semiconductor nanowires (2) Materials applications in solar energy harvesting and conversion, hydrogen storage and fuel cell technology, photocatalytic reductions of greenhouse gas (3) Detection technology of ultra high sensitivity surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), and broad spectrum particle radiations. Her work has been highlighted in the MIT Technology Review in 2007. She received her PhD. in Materials Science from Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Claire Gu received her Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech in 1989.  Then she worked as a member of the technical staff at Rockwell Science Center, and went to Penn State in 1992 as an assistant professor.  In 1997, she came to UC Santa Cruz as the first Electrical Engineering faculty member, and is now a professor in EE.  Her research interests include fiber optics, holographic data storage, liquid crystal displays, nonlinear optics, and optical information processing; with a current emphasis on fiber sensors using SERS (surface enhanced Raman scattering).  She has published about 200 journal and conference papers in these areas.  In addition, she has co-authored a text/reference book on "Optics of Liquid Crystal Displays", and co-edited two technical books on photorefractive nonlinear optics and applications.  She received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1993.  From 2000 to 2006, she served as a Topical Editor of Optics Letters. In 2007, she was elected as a fellow of SPIE (The International Society of Optical Engineering).

Dr. Nobuhiko “Nobby” P. Kobayashi, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Baskin School of Engineering, University of California Santa Cruz. UC Santa Cruz is addressing the global need for next-generation energy sources, which is paramount to sustainability and the well being of humans on earth. He comes to UCSC from the HP Quantum Sciences Lab. Two available sources – light from the sun and waste heat – offer an enormous opportunity for the development of highly-efficient, reliable, and cost-effective solid-state energy conversion devices.  Dr. Kobayashi’s research focuses on semi-conductor nanometer-scale structures, employed because of their highly-anisotropic shapes. His approach is based on hybrid structures and the development of nanometer and micrometer-scale semiconductors for application in advanced devices that would deliver ultra-high energy conversion at ultra-low cost. Professor Kobayashi received his PhD in Materials Science from USC.

Dr. Joel Kubby is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  His research is in the area of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) with applications in Optics, Fluidics and Bio-MEMS.  Prior to joining the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2005, he was an Area Manager with the Wilson Center for Research and Technology and a Member of Technical Staff in the Webster Research Center in Rochester New York (1987-2005).  While with Xerox he received a Xerox Excellence in Science and Technology Award.  Prior to Xerox he was at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill New Jersey working in the area of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM).  While at Bell Labs he received an Exceptional Contribution Award.  He has led a six company industrial research consortium under the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program (ATP) to develop a new process for optical MEMS and has over 78 patents and over 40 journal publications.  He is the co-chair of the SPIE Silicon Photonics conference and the MEMS Adaptive Optics conference.

Dr. Edward M. Landesman, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  He currently serves as Associate Director for Intersegmental Relations for the University of California Science and Mathematics Initiative.  He has served as the Education Director and currently is the Co-Executive Director of The Collaborative for Higher Education, a collaboration between the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Jose State University, and the Foothill De Anza Community College District.  He has consulted with NASA Ames, the University of California College Prep Initiative, Academic Systems Corporation, Lightspan, WestEd, and numerous school districts.  He is a pioneer in educational technology and his teaching of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz has been honored with numerous awards, both local and national. He has a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in mathematics, all from the University of California, Los Angeles.  In 1966, Dr. Landesman joined the mathematics faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).  There, he also served as Provost of Crown College and as Associate Academic Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education.

Dr. Nader Pourmand is an Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering. He is head of The Biosensors and Bioelectrical Technology Group. The lab's primary goal is to further develop biological and electrical technologies that aid in the study of genes and proteins. Pourmand and his team hold seventeen patents and publish in dozens of peer-reviewed scientific journals. While at Stanford between 1999 and 2008, Pourmond co-founded and directed the "Stanford startup" Xagros Technologies, Inc., a developer of technologies for genome profiling. In 2001, Pourmand won the second place $25,000 prize for Xagros Technologies in the Stanford Entrepreneur's Challenge. Aside from publications through UCSC, Pourmand has been published in more than forty scientific journals including the Oxford University Press, Cancer Research, PLoS ONE  and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Ali Shakouri, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Baskin School of Engineering, University of California Santa Cruz. The main research of Dr. Shakouri’s group is on solid-state devices that allow direct conversion of heat into electricity. He is the Director of the Center for Thermionic Energy Conversion headquartered at UCSC. There are fundamental and practical limits of conventional thermoelectric power generation.  Novel metal-semiconductor nanocomposites are being developed where the heat and charge transport are modified at the atomic level.  This provides for the potential to reach high power densities and high conversion efficiencies.  Similar principles can be applied to make micro refrigerators on a chip and remove hot spots in integrated circuits. The multi university research initiative (MURI) headquartered at UCSC involves 12 groups from 7 universities and has received major grants from organizations, such as the Office of Naval Research and DARPA. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering at CalTech. Prof. Shakouri was the recipient of a Packard fellowship in 1999 and an NSF Career Award in 2000.

Dr. Deepak Srivastava is the Chief Technology Officer of Nanoexa, a clean energy company focused on quantum simulation and nano-materials synthesis based materials design, optimization, and product development for high energy and high power Li-Ion battery for power tools, PHEV, EV and HEV applications, For more than ten years, Deepak Srivastava has also been a lead senior scientist and task manager of computational materials design for nano-composites for thermal and impact protection applications, and nanotubes and nanowires for nano-electronics and nano-sensors related applications at UARC and NASA Ames Research Center. He has published more than 100 technical journal papers and given more than 100 invited talks on computational materials design, in the nanotechnology, nanomaterials and nanoelectronics in aerospace and defense applications, and recently on Li-ion batteries for energy storage applications. His recent awards and honors include winner of Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Theory) in 1997, Veridian Medal Papers (1999), The Eric Reissener Medal (2002), and CSC Award for Technical Excellence (2003).

BIN-RDI Industrial Affiliates:

Anders Riel Muller, Baltic Sea Solutions
Cattien Nguyen, 4Wind Science and Engineering