Professor Duquette received his Ph.D. in metallury and materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. Following his graduate work, he performed research on elevated temperature materials at the Advanced Materials Research and Deelopment Laboratory of Pratt and Whitney Aircraft, joining the Rensselaer faculty in 1970. He is the author or co-author of more than 160 scientific publications, primarily in the areas of environmental degradation of materials and electrochemical processing of semiconductor interconnects.
Professor Gall is member of the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his Diploma from the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1994, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000. Prof. Gall has been a Visiting Scientist at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, Illinois, and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Polytechnic Federal Lausanne. He has served as Assistant Editor and Editorial Board Member for Thin Solid Films, as Associate Editor for the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A, as chair for the AVS Advanced Surface Engineering Division, as proceedings editor, session, symposium, and program chair for the AVS International Symposium and the International Conference for Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films. Prof. Gall’s research focuses on the development of an atomistic understanding for thin film growth, with particular interest in transition-metal nitride coatings, ion-surface interactions, and glancing angle deposition. He has pioneered a multiple length-scale approach to explain texture evolution in hard-coatings, has shown how low-energy ion-irradiation can be employed to control surface diffusion processes and resulting microstructures, and has developed a variety of uniquely shaped nanostructure architectures by exploiting atomic shadowing effects during physical vapor deposition. His research on novel transition-metal nitrides was identified as one of “the 100 most important scientific discoveries during the past two and a half decades, supported by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science”. He also won the 2006 Alfred H. Geisler Memorial Award for “Outstanding Contributions in Education and Thin Film Growth Research,” the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation, the 2007 Outstanding Research Award from the Rensselaer School of Engineering, the 2008 Early Career Award for “Excellence in Education and Outstanding Research in the Field of Thin Film and Nanostructure Growth,” and the 2008 IBM Faculty Award for research on “Post-CMOS Nanoelectronics.” Professor Gall holds one US patent, has authored 3 book chapters and over 90 peer-reviewed journal articles, and has presented his research results in over 40 invited lectures in North America and Europe. His students won numerous poster competitions, best paper awards, and best microscopy awards. Prof. Gall’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the ACS Petroleum Research Fund, IBM, and the State of New York. http://www.rpi.edu/~galld
Nikhil Koratkar received his B.Tech degree from IIT-Bombay in 1995, followed my MS and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1998 and 2000. His research interests lie in the development and characterization of advancednanostructured materials and devices. He has published his work in top journals such as Nature, Nature Materials, Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, Applied Physics Letters and Small to name a few. He is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation's faculty CAREER development award and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Early Career Award. He is also an Associate Editor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Letters journal.
