Welcome to the SUPREME newsletter. At the Center for SUPeRior Energy-efficient Materials and dEvices (SUPREME), we are dedicated to demonstrating the basic materials and technology breakthroughs needed to address the seismic shifts identified by the semiconductor community. We are committed to broadening participation and supporting interdisciplinary education of the workforce for the future of the semiconductor industry.

“For inventing and applying “polarization doping” and “distributed polarization doping” to MBE-grown nitride heterostructures enabling record-breaking UV LEDs, UV lasers, and n-channel and p-channel HEMTs.” At the 2024 NAMBE Prof. Jena was honored with the Art Gossard MBE Innovator Award. Prof. Jena learned MBE from Art Gossard at UCSB during his PhD study.

Congrats to Rob Bennett for receiving the “Best Best Student Presentation Award” at the MRS Spring 2024 Meeting! Yup, it was that good.😉  If you missed the talk, he also has an arXiv pre-print on the topic: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19022.

Our students are some of the best on the planet. Keeping pace with them is no small feat, so we listen closely, and we look continuously for new ways to improve what we do in our classrooms, our labs, and everywhere else our students are working. The faculty listed below have made exceptional contributions to the Institute’s educational mission.

We are delighted to congratulate and introduce Finley Donachie ‘24 as the eighth winner of the Class of 1957 Spectrum Award.  “Fin” received his BS in Materials Science & Engineering, Summa Cum Laude, and has relocated to California where he will pursue doctoral study at California Institute of Technology following a summer internship with Applied Materials in Silicon Valley.

That’s a wrap. Thank you to all participants, for MIT for hosting the Annual Review, and especially to the students and PIs who showcased their results that they have achieved in the first 1.5 years of the center.

Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2023 North America: We believe that research and development is the key to harnessing the power of imagination and to discovering new possibilities. We are excited to announce a new kind of Fellowship that promotes Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork. Our goal is to enable students to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas.

Congratulations to Dr. Rehan Younas of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, who was just announced as the recipient of the 2023 Nicollian Award for Best Student Presentation of the 54th IEEE Semiconductor Interface Specialists Conference (SISC) for his talk titled “Ferromagnetism in Tungsten Diselenide and the Role of Selenium Vacancies.” Rehan successfully defended his PhD dissertation on March 28, 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Hinkle. Rehan has accepted a position with Micron Technology in Boise, Idaho to work on their NAND flash memory technology.

Ambrose was among the 42 Merrill Scholars who celebrated the high school teacher or mentor with the greatest influence on their early education and the Cornell faculty or staff member who contributed most significantly to their college experience. The scholars are graduating seniors selected by deans of the university’s 10 undergraduate colleges and schools based on outstanding scholastic achievement, evidence of leadership and their desire to positively affect the world beyond Cornell. Ambrose is joining Princeton for Grad School in Fall.

Donachie plans to do research on advancing the Thermal Laser Epitaxy (TLE) system at Caltech. It  is the only TLE system in the USA and still a work in progress, he says. “This novel method will allow us to synthesize materials that exhibit quantum phenomena using high-melting-temperature refractory metals, a technique only paralleled by a similar system in Germany.”

Margaret Quinn, third-year graduate student in the Applied Physics Program at Northwestern University in the Rondinelli research group, was awarded an NSF-GRFP fellowship. Her interests are in novel ferroelectric materials and formulating theories of solid-state systems, including electronic properties, magnetism, correlation, and phase transitions using first-principles methods. The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to help ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. The award recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in the U.S. and abroad.

SUPREME PI, Elton Graugnard, gave an invited presentation at the 2024 Area Selective Deposition workshop in Montreal, CA April 14-17. SURPEME PI, Greg Parsons, also presented on new results for ASD based on the fluorination of SiO2 as a non-growth surface. The workshop was well attended by academic and industrial researchers. Talks covered new classes of small molecule inhibitors as well as intrinsic selectivity for the development of new Advanced Processing techniques to enable self-aligned deposition with fewer fabrication steps.