NYSTAR Faculty Development Grant Helps UB Recruit World-Class Scientist in Nanoelectronics

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR) has awarded a $750,000 Faculty Development award to the University at Buffalo to recruit Jonathan Bird, Ph.D., as a professor to its Department of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The grant was one of four that NYSTAR awarded this week in order to assist institutions of higher education in New York State to recruit and retain world-class scientists to New York State, helping to ensure the continued long-term growth of the state's high-technology industries.

Russell W. Bessette, M.D., executive director of NYSTAR, said: "This award is important to Buffalo because Dr. Bird will enhance the research being performed at two separate research centers at UB while moving this world-class institution further along in terms of its ability to perform critically important research in nanotechnology."

Bird, who conducts research in nanoelectronics, is scheduled to arrive on campus in mid-August.

According to Mark Karwan, Ph.D., dean of SEAS, the successful recruitment of Bird to UB helps strengthen a core focus for the university in areas related to nanotechnology.

"UB is developing a critical mass of researchers in these areas so that we can compete with the best," said Karwan. "Bird brings with him an outstanding international reputation, as well as a set of experimental skills and related equipment that we did not have in experimental nanoelectronics."

In particular, it is Bird's contributions in fabrication of nanomaterials that make his expertise so valuable and so complementary to UB's existing strengths both in development and characterization of new materials, explained Kenneth Tramposch, Ph.D., associate vice president for research at UB.

Bird's research ranges from fabrication of novel nanoelectronic structures and the characterization of their electrical characteristics to quantum chaos in quantum dots and proof-of-principle demonstrations of spintronic devices that exploit unique properties of semiconductor nanostructures.

He has been well-funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Office of Naval Research in areas that include nanostructures, quantum dots and semiconductor structures.

At UB, Bird will work closely with faculty from several departments who are collaborating on interdisciplinary research at centers including the Center for Advanced Photonic and Electronic Materials and the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics.

Bird received his doctorate in 1990 from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and has been a researcher at RIKEN (the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), one of Japan's top national laboratories.

Most recently, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University.

A fellow of the Institute of Physics, Bird has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, co-authored the undergraduate text Electron Transport in Quantum Dots (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003) and is an executive editor of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.