Biography

Dr. Stefan Zollner is a CMOS integration engineer (a condensed matter physicist by training) with Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., on assignment at the IBM East Fishkill facility in New York. He studied semiconductor physics in Regensburg, Stuttgart (Germany), and Tempe, AZ. In 1991/92, he was a postdoc at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, to work on strained Si and Si:C alloy growth development. In 1992, he became an Assistant Professor of Physics at Iowa State University, with a joint appointment at the Ames Laboratory (US-DOE). He joined Freescale Semiconductor (then Motorola) in 1997 as an analytical engineer. Most of his research has used spectroscopic ellipsometry to investigate novel electronic materials and their physical properties. More recently, he has worked on low-resistance contacts to CMOS nanodevices. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Past Chair of FIAP (Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics), and was Vice Chair of the International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors held in Flagstaff, AZ, in 2004. He is an author on over 100 printed publications and about 100 conference contributions. With S. Pantelides, he has edited a book on silicon-germanium-carbon alloys.

Statement

About ten years ago, FIAP was founded to serve the industrial physics community in the APS. Over the years (and with my involvement), our purpose has changed and we have grown into the largest APS unit. Our goal is now to connect three different communities: Industrial APS members, academic physicists in other fields (such as engineering), and applied physicists everywhere (especially students interested in applied physics careers). For many years, I have supported this goal with professional committee service and by organizing FIAP sessions at APS meetings intended to strengthen the ties between these three groups and to highlight interesting industrial physics topics to the broader APS community. As FIAP Councilor, I will continue to support such programs. Additionally, we need to consider that over half of U.S. physics graduates are employed in industry. A significant percentage of APS members are industrial physicists. I will represent this group in the APS Council and will enhance APS membership benefits for industrial physicists, as identified by the recent APS Industrial Physics Task Force, such as access to current physics highlights, networking on the national and local scale, and recognition through awards, invited talks, and society fellowship.