News Story

Oehrlein Receives IBM Faculty Award

Professor Gottlieb Oehrlein.

Clark School professor Gottlieb Oehrlein (Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics) has received the 2010 IBM Faculty Award in recognition of his research program's achievements in the area of nanostructure fabrication, a field important to the computer and electronics industries. The award comes with a cash prize of $10,000.

Oehrlein is the director of the Laboratory for Plasma Processing of Materials. His research interests include low-temperature plasma science and technology, plasma and process diagnostics, plasma-surface interactions, physics and chemistry of micro- and nanostructure fabrication, novel materials, and surface physics and chemistry. In 2007, he spent his sabbatical at the Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik, where he participated in research on plasma-materials interactions for fusion reactor design. Earlier this year, he was recognized as being among the 250 most highly cited authors in his discipline over the past three decades by Thomson Reuters' ISIHighlyCited.com web site, and a new course he designed, "Bigger, Faster, Better: The Quest for Absolute Technology" was designated for the University's "I" series, the pilot of the proposed General Education program that represents the evolution of the traditional CORE course requirements. He has been listed among the university's Research Leaders for bringing sponsored research dollars to campus. His research group is currently hosting Feodor Lynen Fellow Dr. Evelina Vogli, from the University of Dortmund, Germany, and Professor Lijun Wang from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.

Oehrlein also has a history of cultivating successful young plasma scientists in his research program, and two of his recent alumni have gone on to work for IBM's Advanced Plasma Processing Group at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York: Dr. Bobby Bruce (Ph.D. '10) won the 2009 American Vacuum Society Student Merit award and was also one of six finalists for the AVS's highly prestigious John Coburn and Harold Winters Student Award in Plasma Science and Technology. Dr. Sebastian Engelmann (Ph.D. '08) published a book based on his dissertation titled Plasma-Surface Interactions of Advanced Photoresist Systems. While at Maryland, both Bruce and Engelmann were involved in research aimed at improving the quality of plasma etching techniques used by the electronics manufacturing industry.

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September 14, 2010