To: ICES Faculty and Staff
From: Pradeep K. Khosla
Date: June 9, 2006
Subject: Appointment of Dr. Gary Fedder as Director of ICES

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Gary Fedder as Director of ICES effective July 1, 2006.

Gary is the Howard M. Wilkoff Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and The Robotics Institute. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from MIT in 1982 and 1984, respectively. From 1984 to 1989, Gary worked at the Hewlett-Packard Company on circuit design and printed-circuit modeling. In 1994, he obtained the Ph.D. degree from U. C. Berkeley, where his research resulted in the first demonstration of multimode control of an underdamped surface-micromachined inertial device.

Gary’s research interests include microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) modeling, simulation and synthesis, integration of MEMS and CMOS, physical sensor design, microactuator control systems, RF MEMS, gas chemical microsensors and implantable biosensors. He is the founder and co-director of the MEMS Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon and has directed several multi-disciplinary research projects in microsystems with investigators at CMU, and from academia and industry. From 1996 to the present, his group has refined a hierarchical circuit-based representation of surface-micromachined MEMS that forms the foundation for an intuitive, reusable, top-down design environment. In 1994, Gary’s group began developing a unique process to create electrostatically actuated microstructures with high-aspect-ratio composite-beam suspensions using conventional CMOS processing followed by a sequence of maskless dry-etching steps. From 2000-2004, the lab’s RF-MEMS thrust has produced high tuning range MEMS varactors and high-Q inductors in CMOS and BiCMOS foundry processes, monolithically integrated in VCO and filter circuits. Microdevices studied include semiconducting polymer-based chemical gas sensors, RF tunable passives, RF nanoresonator mixer/filters, bioimplantable sensors, infrared sensors, ultrasonic detectors, and inertial sensor arrays.

Gary received the 1993 AIME Electronic Materials Society Ross Tucker Award, the 1996 Carnegie Institute of Technology George Tallman Ladd Research Award, and the 1996 NSF CAREER Award. He led the team that won third place in the national Semiconductor Research Corporation Copper Design Contest in 1999. Currently, he serves as a subject editor for the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, on the editorial boards of the IoP Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering and IET Micro & Nano Letters, and as co-editor of the Wiley-VCH Sensors Update and Advanced Micro- and Nanosystems book series. He served as general co-chair of the 2005 IEEE MEMS Conference. He has contributed to over 100 research publications and several patents in the MEMS area.

He is a sought after consultant and has served on or is serving as a consultant to Akustica, Digital Site Systems, Hale & Dorr, Lockheed Martin, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Kearfott Guidance & Navigation, MEMSCAP, Motorola, Sarcon Microsystems, and Seagate Research.

I want to thank all members of the search committee for doing an excellent job in collecting, analyzing, and summarizing the information from various constituencies while maintaining the strictest confidence. I especially want to acknowledge Professor Dan Siewiorek who chaired the committee with fairness, insight, and vision.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank Professor Cristina Amon for her visionary leadership of ICES from 1999 to 2006, fostering a culture of innovation and multidisciplinary collaboration. Cristina enabled the creation and development of several new initiatives including, most recently, the Center for Nano-enabled Device and Energy Technologies (CNXT), and the Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR).

I look forward to working with Gary, the ICES faculty and staff, and the university administration to maintain the momentum of an already excellent Institute.

cc: President Cohon, Provost Kamlet, Vice Presidents, and Deans CIT Department Heads, CIT Dean’s Office, Director of The Robotics Institute