Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series welcoming National University of Singapore professor

Thirumalai Venky Venkatesan, professor and director of the National University of Singapore's Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative, will speak Monday (Dec. 3) on reducing the energy consumption of memory devices. This lecture is presented by Discovery Park and the Birck Nanotechnology Center as part of the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series.

Venkatesan’s talk, “Road to Ultra-low Switching Energy Memories to Artificial Neurons,” is open to the public and will begin at 1:30 p.m. in Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121.

Venkatesan will present research that demonstrates the viability of reducing power requirements for memories by discussing three approaches to neuronal devices his team is studying: organic metal-centered azo complexes, oxide-based ferroelectric tunnel junctions, and live neuronal circuits.

Venkatesan is the director of the Nano Institute at the National University of Singapore, where he is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, physics, materials science and engineering, and integrative sciences and engineering. As the inventor of the pulsed laser deposition process, he has more than 750 papers and 30 patents and is globally among the top 100 physicists (ranked at 66 in 2000) in terms of his citations (more than 43,000 with a Hirsch Index of 106-Google Scholar). He is also the founder and chairman of Neocera, a company specializing in the area of pulsed laser deposition and magnetic field imaging systems. Venkatesan holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York and Bell Laboratories.

The Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by the Lilly Endowment as a mechanism for Purdue and Discovery Park to bring to campus the latest thinking about science and technology and other broad areas of public interest.

Writer: Elizabeth Harwood, eharwood@purdue.edu