I began my academic career teaching about the semiconductor devices that I had researched at Bell Labs. But I soon found that many students struggled with my conventional, math-based, lessons. In my "mind's eye," real-life experience allowed me to see how math described these microscopic, three-dimensional, ever-changing devices (including even their completely invisible electric fields). But in my classroom, math plus static PowerPoint and blackboard images did not allow many students to make a similar connection.
Frustrated, I began to explore computer animation techniques and proposed to the National Science Foundation (NSF / ) the creation of an online "Virtual Lab" that would use animation, calling upon intuitive high-school-level science, to provide a "gateway" into microelectronics and its related science and applications.
In 1999 NSF provided a substantial grant under their Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program. Thus was born the "UVA Virtual Lab" (which has now become the Virtual Lab component of this new WeCanFigureThisOut.org website).
The Virtual Lab‘s approach can be seen in this How Semiconductors and Transistors Work webpage (which, alone, has now been viewed by over one million visitors). The impact of the website grew to the point that the international (almost half million member) Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) awarded me their 2009 Undergraduate Teaching Medal "for providing opportunities to both undergraduate and pre-college students for discovery through both laboratory projects and virtual experiments on the world wide web."
A few years later, NSF‘s Nanoscience Undergraduate Education (NUE) program challenged academics to develop a new curriculum introducing early undergraduates to this rapidly emerging field. In response, I led a University of Virginia (UVA / ) team proposing a "Hands on Introduction to Nanoscience" that would incorporate new miniaturized scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes (STMs / AFMs). These instruments would allow freshmen to do something that the overwhelming majority of career scientists never get a chance to do: see individual atoms.
This idea, coupled with my commitment to web post all materials developed for the class (including new Virtual Lab animations explaining the inner working of these STMs and AFMs) won a 2007 NUE grant. I spent those funds entirely on instrumentation for the class at UVA. UVA, in turn, supplied additional funds to expand those labs, and to both maintain and supply them for the seventeen times I taught the class. The online content that I created for that class is now the Nanoscience component of WeCanFigureThisOut.org.
Although I have never worked directly in the energy field, my Bell Labs research involved "optoelectronic" telecommunication devices that are based on the same physics and materials as photovoltaic solar cells (PV cells). This brought me into frequent contact with PV researchers, including two who went on to found major U.S. solar energy companies.
But I then became more and more aware of the disconnect between these colleagues‘s optimism and the slow/minor real-world impact of solar energy. Enlightenment came when I read David J.C. MacKay‘s extraordinary book Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air. MacKay hammered on the message that energy is all about SYSTEMS and that a single technology (such as PV solar) can be virtually useless if it does not fit into such a system (supporting and supported by that system‘s other technologies, and consistent with their economic and sociopolitical ground rules).
Since 2005 visitors to these WCFTO websites have viewed: 15,796,723 webpages & documents.
I grew up in what was then developing into California‘s "Silicon Valley" (an interesting experience that included a junior high school friendship with a guy we nicknamed Woz).
I went south to earn my B.S. degree at Caltech in 1972. I then came back north to Stanford were I earned my M.S. in 1974 and Ph.D. in early 1976. My Stanford thesis was on early electronic processing of a material, CdTe, that has only recently gained traction in the field of solar energy. All of my degrees were in Applied Physics.
I then moved across the country to join the Physical Sciences Research Division of Bell Labs, in Murray Hill NJ. There I was Member of Technical Staff, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, and later Head of the Materials Science Research Department. In my lab I developed a technique called "Silicon Molecular Beam Epitaxy" and used it to do the pioneering research on the growth, properties and applications of GeSi, a material that is now used throughout the microelectronics industry. For that work I was named as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1991.
I then left industry in early 1997 to join the faculty of the University of Virginia as the "J.M. Money Professor of Engineering & Applied Science." There I continued my research while expanding my educational efforts (as detailed in the preceding section).
For my cumulative body of research (link), in 2003 the publishers of Science Citation Index (the precursor of Google Scholar) named me to their list of Highly Cited Researchers ("250 preeminent individual researchers in each of 21 subject categories who have demonstrated great influence in their field as measured by citations to their work").
At the University of Virginia, my educational work was recognized by an "All University Teaching Award" (2004), induction as an inaugural member of their "Academy of Teaching" (2011), and the Hartfield Jefferson Scholars Foundation Teaching Prize (2015).