The Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) held its first annual IEN USER Day on May 16, 2013.  The IEN USER (User, Science, and Engineering Review) Day was a success in technical, academic, and cultural diversity with over 100 IEN cleanroom and lab users in attendance. They represented a wide array of academic disciplines including MEMS, electronics, materials, optics and photonics, chemistry, physics, life sciences, and medicine.  Participants included faculty and students from Georgia Tech, Emory University, University of South Carolina, Clemson University, University of Texas at Dallas, University of Alabama, Southern Polytechnic State University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  Other participants included industry and government partners, as well as prospective cleanroom users, lab users, and partners.

The event was hosted in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, which houses one of Georgia Tech’s state-of-the-art shared-user facilities with cleanrooms for micro- and nano-fabrication, as well as facilities for biotechnology, characterization, and metrology needs.  This unique laboratory suite stimulates new interdisciplinary research by bringing together engineering and science faculty and research teams to develop nano-enabled next-generation technology, devices, and systems that will provide benefits for healthcare, environment, energy, and national security.

The IEN USER Day opened with a welcome by IEN Interim Executive Director Dr. Oliver Brand, followed by a keynote lecture by Dr. Mina Rais-Zadeh, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan.  Dr. Rais-Zadeh’s lecture focused on her research in RF (radio-frequency) MEMS and microsystems and was followed by four sessions with oral presentations on a variety of topics including MEMS sensing, biomedical devices, fabrication technologies, and next generation devices.

Best speakers awards were presented to Toby Xu, a graduate student from the G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, for his lecture Investigation of Dual Mode Side and Forward Looking IVUS Using a Dual Ring CMUT-on-CMOS Array, and to Farshid Ghasemi, a graduate student from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, for his lecture Toxin Detection Using Nanofabricated Silicon Nitride Microrings at Visible Wavelength.

A poster session, with 49 posters covering a wide array of research areas, was also featured as part of the event. Two best-poster awards were granted to graduate students Banafsheh Barabadi, from the G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, for the poster Computational and Experimental Multi-scale Transient Thermal Characterization of Microelectronics, and Lucas Lane, from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, for the poster  Advancement of Blinking Suppressed Quantum Dots for Enhanced Single Biomolecule Imaging. The recipients of the best-paper and best-poster awards received a certificate and IEN will waive the monthly cleanroom access fee for them for one quarter.

This first-annual IEN USER event was designed to promote collaboration and showcase research breadth by giving researchers a cross-disciplinary look at the work being done in the Georgia Tech IEN cleanrooms and labs.  Although this was the first IEN USER event, the program garnered some very positive feedback from attendees.  Comments offered by participants included: “The context of the oral program was extremely well selected and the scope of the conference was very intriguing” and, “Great way to help those who see each other often in the cleanroom to gain a better understanding of what others are researching and exchange ideas…worthwhile for all users to participate and get to know one another”.  Plans for the 2014 IEN USER Day are already underway.

IEN was established as an Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI) at Georgia Tech and is a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) to support nanoscale fabrication, synthesis, characterization, modeling, design, computation, and hands-on training to all qualified users, as well as providing K-12 and undergraduate student outreach and educational programs. For more information about IEN’s shared user facilities or the NNIN program please email info@ien.gatech.edu or visit www.ien.gatech.edu.