Dr. William King, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, has been selected as a member of Technology Review's 2006 TR35, a list of top technology innovators under the age of 35.

The list represents top young scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs in a wide range of disciplines - from chemistry and biology to chip design and software engineering - selected by Technology Review. The honorees are selected by the editors of the magazine in collaboration with a prestigious panel of judges from major institutions and corporations such as Boston University, Hewlett-Packard Labs, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology and Applied Materials.

"The TR35 is an amazing group of people," said Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review. "Their accomplishments are likely to shape their fields for decades to come. It's evident when you scroll back and see names like Sergey Brin, Jonathan Ive and Steve Jurvetson among the past winners."

King's groundbreaking research focuses on nanometer-scale thermal processing, with applications in nano-manufacturing and nano-materials analysis.

With the help of his graduate students, King recently developed instruments for probing the nanometer-scale thermomechanical properties of solid materials. The instruments are particularly useful for materials discovery, where scientists previously lacked tools for nanometer-scale thermal analysis. King also works on cantilever microsensors, whose integrated heaters allow for detailed examination of biological and chemical responses.

In 2004, King and collaborators developed a technique to use nanometer-sized heated probe tips for dip pen nanolithography (DPN), an increasingly popular technique using atomic-force microscopy probes as pens to produce nanometer-scale patterns. Using King's new thermal DPN method, scientists are now able to produce features too small to be formed with light-based lithography.

Between 1999 and 2001, King spent 1.5 years working in the Micro/NanoMechanics group at the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich Switzerland on Millipede Probe-Based Data Storage, widely regarded as the first corporate, product-focused nanotechnology project in the world.

King has won a number of prestigious awards, including the elite Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest award that the U.S. government can award to an untenured professor, and the National Science Foundation CAREER award. King has written over 100 articles in journals and technical conferences, and sits on the scientific advisory board at five companies.

He received his bachelor's degree at the University of Dayton and his master's and Ph.D. degrees at Stanford University.

King is Georgia Tech's third member of the TR35.