Methods of nanofabrication, especially applied to superconducting photodetectors, templated self-assembly, computing

Karl Berggren is the Emanuel E. Landsman (1958) Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he heads the Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group. He is also director of the Nanostructures Laboratory in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and is a core faculty member in the Microsystems Technology Laboratory.

From 1996 to 2003, Berggren served as a staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass. His current research focuses on methods of nanofabrication, especially applied to superconductive quantum circuits, photodetectors, high-speed superconductive electronics, and energy systems. His thesis work focused on nanolithographic methods using neutral atoms.

Vladimir Bulovic joined the MIT faculty in 2000 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. His research interests include studies of physical properties of organic and organic/inorganic nanodot composite thin films and structures, and development of novel optoelectronic organic and hybrid nano-scale devices.

In 2004, Professor Bulovic was named as one of the TR100, the list of top young innovators in technology named annually by Technology Review magazine. In the same year, he also was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE), the nation's highest honor for scientists and engineers at the beginning of their research careers.

Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli is assistant professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering. Hamad-Schifferli's research includes the use of nanoparticles to manipulate biomolecules and biological processes, the biophysical effects of nanoparticles on proteins and DNA, and applications of nanoparticles in drug delivery and manipulating gene expression.

Jing Kong is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Peking University, Beijing, China, in 1997, and her PhD in chemistry at Stanford University in 2002.

Before joining MIT in 2004, she worked at NASA Ames Research Center as a research scientist and then a postdoc researcher at Delft University in The Netherlands. Her group focuses on the synthesis and characterization of carbon nanomaterials, including nanotubes and graphene.

Caroline Ross has been a professor at MIT in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering since 1997. Prior to that, she spent six years working in research and development at Komag, an independent supplier of computer hard disks. This work was preceded by two years of research as a postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

She has a bachelor’s degree and a PhD from Cambridge University in England, has published about 200 papers and 10 patents, and is a member of the Materials Research Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the American Physical Society, and the Electrochemical Society. She is a fellow of the APS, the MRS and the UK Institute of Physics, and Chair of the 2011 Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Conference.

Michael S. Strano is the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He received his BS from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn and his PhD from the University of Delaware, both in chemical engineering.

He was a postdoctoral research fellow from 2001 to 2003 at Rice University in the chemistry and physics departments, under the guidance of Nobel laureate Richard E. Smalley. From 2003 to 2007, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before moving his laboratory to MIT.

His research focuses on biomolecule-nanoparticle interactions and the surface chemistry of low-dimensional systems, nanoelectronics, nanoparticle separations and applications of vibrational spectroscopy to nanotechnology. Strano is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including a 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a 2006 Beckman Young Investigator Award, the 2006 Coblentz Award for Molecular Spectroscopy, the 2007 Unilever Award from the American Chemical Society for excellence in colloidal science, the 2008 Young Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society and the 2008 Allen P. Colburn award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.