Research Activities

Micro and Nano Electromechanical Systems (M/NEMS)

My research interests are in the broad area of micro and nano electromechanical systems. I am interested in technologies that merge electronics and mechanical structures and have contributed to research in this area since my Ph.D. thesis research at Berkeley (1982 - 84), but I am not pursuing this area in the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility (SNF). However, my students are currently designing in emerging foundry processes that offer co-fabricated MEMS and CMOS.

My research in the SNF is concentrated on understanding, controlling, and exploiting the control of surface and interface phenomena to enable new applications in nanophotonics for energy conversion, sensing, and signal processing, as well as nano electromechanical logic and memory devices. Examples of current research can be found in my recent conference publications -- see the "publications" tab. The major research programs which I'm currently involved with are described under the "research group" tab. I am increase my research activities in the biomedical applications (charge sensing in nanopores) and in energy conversion (micro thermionic energy converter technology).