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February 8, 2002

Trustees honor 2 profs, dean; OK PNC degree and constitution

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The Purdue University Board of Trustees today (Friday, 2/8) honored two professors in electrical and computer engineering as well as the new dean of engineering.

The board also approved a new degree program and a faculty constitution for Purdue North Central.

Mark Lundstrom is the first Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and James Cooper becomes the Charles William Harrison Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Linda Katehi's earlier appointment as the John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering also was ratified.

"These professorships are among the highest honors one can achieve in an academic career," said Provost Sally Frost Mason. "The fact that the recognition comes from peers in your field makes it even more meaningful. All three are very deserving of the designations as both scholars and teachers."

Mark Lundstrom

Lundstrom's distinguished professorship is named for Greater Lafayette natives and Purdue alumni Donald and Carol Scifres, whose recent gifts provided funding to create a professorship and help build a new nanotechnology center on the West Lafayette campus. Donald Scifres is a Purdue graduate in electrical engineering who holds more than 130 patents and is co-chairman of the board and chief strategy officer of JDS Uniphase Corp., an optical communications company in San Jose, Calif.

Lundstrom earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1973 and 1974, respectively. He joined the Purdue faculty upon completing his doctorate on the West Lafayette campus in 1980. His research interests center on computational electronics with a focus on the physics of semiconductor devices, especially nanoscale transistors. His previous work includes studies of heterostructure devices, solar cells, heterojunction bipolar transistors and semiconductor lasers. He and his students have published extensively on these topics.

During the course of his Purdue career, Lundstrom has served as director of the Optoelectronics Research Center and assistant dean of the Schools of Engineering. He is the author of the textbook "Fundamentals of Carrier Transport" and is a fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the American Physical Society. Lundstrom also is the recipient of the American Society of Engineering Educators' Frederick Emmons Terman Award and has won two awards for teaching from Purdue. He is the 2002 co-recipient – with Supriyo Datta, Purdue's Thomas Duncan Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering – of IEEE's Cledo Brunetti Award for their work on nanoscale electronics.

James Cooper

Cooper's professorship was established in 1995 and named for Purdue electrical engineering alumnus Charles William Harrison, the founder of Harrison Laboratories in Berkeley Heights, N.J.

Cooper earned a bachelor's degree at Mississippi State University in 1968, a master's degree from Stanford University in 1969 and a doctorate from Purdue in 1973. He then spent 10 years at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., before joining the Purdue faculty in 1983.

While at Bell Labs, he served as principal designer of AT&T's first microprocessor and developed a time-of-flight technique for measuring the high-field drift velocity of electrons in inversion layers on silicon. His primary research interests are semiconductor device physics, wide-band gap semiconductors, power switching devices, electron transport in semiconductors and MOS interface characterization.

Cooper was the founding director of the Purdue Optoelectronics Research Center. He served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices from 1983 through 1986 and was elected fellow of the IEEE in 1993. He was guest editor of the 1999 special issue of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices on SiC device technology. He has co-authored more than 200 technical papers and conference presentations, five book chapters, and holds 11 U.S. patents. Since joining Purdue, he has been principal investigator on more than $22 million in sponsored research contracts, and he was recently named co-director of the Birck Nanotechnology Center, a $51 million research facility being constructed in Purdue's Discovery Park.

With the addition of Lundstrom and Cooper, Purdue now has 51 distinguished professors and 21 named professors on its West Lafayette campus.

Purdue alumnus and trustee John A. Edwardson has provided the funding to endow Katehi's position. Her appointment became effective Jan. 1.

Prior to coming to Purdue, Katehi served as associate dean at the University of Michigan for three years. Her major area of academic research is in microwave circuitry. She has written or co-written seven chapters in books, is author or co-author of 165 articles published or submitted to refereed journals and 260 articles published in conference proceedings. She holds five patents.

In other business, the trustees endorsed a new bachelor of arts program in communications at Purdue's North Central campus. If approved by the Indiana Higher Education Commission, students will be accepted for coursework beginning in the fall of 2002. The new four-year degree would bring the number of bachelor's degree programs available at North Central to nine.

The board also ratified a new faculty constitution for the North Central campus. The document reflects the campus' recent reorganization from nine academic sections to four academic divisions.

Writer: Sharon A. Bowker, (765) 494-9723, sbowker@purdue.edu

Sources: Sally Frost Mason, (765) 494-9709, sfmason@purdue.edu

Mark S. Lundstrom, (765) 494-3515, lundstro@purdue.edu

James A. Cooper, Jr. (765) 494-3514, cooperj@ecn.purdue.edu

Linda Katehi (765) 494-5347; katehi@purdue.edu

Related Web sites:
Purdue Schools of Engineering
Purdue School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Purdue North Central

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu


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