The dean of The University of Texas at Austin College of Engineering will receive an international award in December for research and educational contributions to the field of semiconductor materials and devices.
Dr. Ben Streetman will accept the Aldert van der Ziel award at the 2005 International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS) in Washington, D.C. The ISDRS is a biannual event that attracts engineers, scientists, and students working in the field of advanced electronic materials and device technologies.
"Ben was chosen for the award this year because of his outstanding career achievements in both the solid state device technical area, and his contributions to education through his widely used textbook and his position as dean," said Jim Plummer, Dean of Engineering at Stanford University and the ISDRS awards chair. Plummer is also a former recipient of the award.
As founder and director of the university’s Microelectronics Research Center in the 1980s, Streetman did extensive work on semiconductor materials and devices. His early work was in ion implantation, a technique for introducing controlled impurities in semiconductors using a high energy particle accelerator. Adding such impurities enables the semiconductor crystal to carry the electrical currents necessary for operation in electronic and photonic devices. Streetman also used a technique called Molecular Beam Epitaxy to grow multi-layer crystal structures by evaporating source materials in a high vacuum. This technology is widely used in optical detectors and lasers, such as the lasers in CD players.
Streetman is the author of the book Solid State Electronic Devices, which is printed in four languages and used worldwide. He has supervised 34 Ph.D. students; they later created an endowed award in his honor for graduate students who excel in microelectronics research. As dean of the College of Engineering since 1996, Streetman oversees a college of more than 7,000 students, which is generally ranked among the top half-dozen public schools of engineering in the U.S.
The award honors Aldert van der Ziel, a researcher and educator who "markedly influenced the course of electronics science and technology during his lifetime," according to his biography by the National Academy of Engineering. Previous recipients include Herbert Kroemer, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000.
“I am very pleased that Ben Streetman was selected to receive the Aldert van der Ziel Award,” said ISDRS 2005 Chairman Al Hefner. “We have all benefited from his research and publications.”
Email this article to a friend
About the Cockrell School of Engineering:
The Cockrell School ranks among the top ten engineering programs in the United States and aspires to move into the top five. With the nation's fourth highest number of faculty members elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the Cockrell School's more than 7,000 students work with many of the world's finest engineering educators and researchers. This environment prepares graduates to become engineering leaders and innovators working for the betterment of society.