1st American Workshop on Ellipsometry

Shankar Krishnan received his Ph.D. from Rice University, where he developed novel spectroscopic ellipsometers to study high-temperature liquid materials.  He was a Director and Principal Scientist at Containerless Research, Inc., where he developed a series of high-speed polarimeters and ellipsometers to study transient events on millisecond/microsecond timescales.  Since 2001, he has worked at KLA Corporation, where he has led the development of numerous spectroscopic ellipsometers and reflectometers for film and critical dimension metrology.  He currently serves as a KLA Fellow and Vice President of Engineering.  He has published widely on spectroscopic ellipsometry and high-speed polarimetry, and holds over 110 patents.

Hiroyuki Fujiwara received his Ph.D. degree from the Tokyo Institute of Technology.  He was a research associate at The Pennsylvania State University during 1996–1998.  In 1998, he joined the Electrotechnical Laboratory of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Japan.  Later in 2007, he became a team leader of the Research Center for Photovoltaics at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan.  He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering at Gifu University.

Ashley Bielinski received her bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2014;  and her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2019.  She currently works as an Assistant Materials Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.  Her research centers around atomic layer deposition, a surface synthesis technique that uses sequential surface reactions to deposit material onto a surface in a vacuum chamber.  She developed a new technique for studying ALD reactions that combines in situ ellipsometry with calorimetry measurements.  She was recognized with an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship 2015-2018, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Postdoctoral Fellowship 2019-2022, and the Physical Sciences and Engineering Early Investigator Named Award by Argonne National Laboratory 2022.

Matthew Linford graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1990 and received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science & Engineering and Chemistry, respectively, from Stanford University in 1996.  After a Post-Doc at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Golm (previously Berlin), Germany, with Helmut Möhwald studying polyelectrolyte multilayers, he worked in industry for three years.  In 2000, he took a position as a faculty member at BYU and is now a full professor.  While at BYU, he has studied thin-film characterization using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and spectroscopic ellipsometry; statistical methods for data analysis; new materials for separations science (chromatography); thin-film deposition by atomic layer deposition and sputtering; new materials for long-term digital data storage; and the chemomechanical functionalization of silicon.  He has more than 400 publications, which include peer-reviewed papers, conference proceedings, book chapters, peer-reviewed contributions to Surface Science Spectra, commercial application notes, tutorial articles, and more than 40 patents.  In 2014, he became a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society (AVS).

Connie Barbara Roth received her B.Sc. in Physics from McMaster University (Ontario, Canada), and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada).  She completed postdoctoral positions at Simon Fraser University (British Columbia, Canada) and Northwestern University (Chicago, IL).  She has been a faculty member at Emory University since 2007, receiving tenure in 2013, and was promoted to full professor in the Department of Physics in 2021.  Her research falls under the area of Experimental Soft Matter Physics.  Her research interests include polymer materials, glass transition, physical aging, photophysics, miscibility, and phase separation, with particular interest in surface and interfacial effects observed at the nanoscale in thin films, nanostructured blends, and nanocomposite materials, as well as other perturbations such as external stresses and electric fields.  In 2016, she published an edited book on “Polymer Glasses” (CRC Press).

Anis Attiaoui obtained his Ph.D. in Physics Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada, in January 2023, conducting research under the supervision of Prof. Oussama Moutanabbir. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he works under the mentorship of Prof. Paul McIntyre. He specializes in the epitaxial growth of group-IV semiconductors via chemical vapor deposition and the optoelectronic characterization of materials, employing methods such as photoluminescence, photoreflectance, and absorption spectroscopy. He explores how short-range ordering affects the optical properties of semiconductor materials by integrating Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure analysis with photoluminescence spectroscopy. He is also leading a project at Stanford focused on creating innovative two-dimensional metasurfaces designed to enhance light emission and absorption in the near-infrared to mid-infrared spectral regions, utilizing group-IV semiconductor nanowires.

Nick Keller received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara in 2007.  Since 2007, he has worked for Nanometrics, which merged with Rudolph Technologies to become Onto Innovation in 2019.  He is now a Director of Applications Development and has been instrumental in developing infrared critical-dimension technology and in providing pathfinding simulations to support other new products at the pre-initiation phase.  He has seven issued patents and over 25 publications.