Candidates for the position of executive director in Georgia Tech's Institute for Materials (IMaT) will be making Town Hall presentations during the week of December 7. The schedule for those sessions is shown below. Biographical information for the candidates is shown below the event listings.

 

Monday, Dec. 7 - Martin Mourigal Town Hall Meeting - https://youtu.be/Om6OYfWne3U

Tuesday, Dec 8 - Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb Town Hall Meeting - https://youtu.be/uvVqFeHzFX0

Wednesday, Dec 9 – Eric Vogel Town Hall Meeting -  https://youtu.be/dGlgLYf7Ymw

 

Prof. Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb

Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb is the Harris Saunders, Jr. Chair and Professor in the G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. She received her BSMS summa cum laude from Universita’ di Padova, Italy in 2001 in materials engineering, and her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in 2005 in materials science and engineering, under the guidance of Prof. Susan Trolier-McKinstry. Following her doctoral work, she was a senior research R&D engineer at QUALCOMM MEMS Research and Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2007. In 2014 she held a joint faculty appointment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences.

Prof. Bassiri-Gharb’s research interests are in functional materials and most prominently ferroelectric, piezoelectric, and electro-chemo-mechanically active materials for applications to sensors, actuators, and transducers. Her research combines micro- and nano-fabrication approaches with machine learning in order to uncover processing-structure-property relationships and nascent functionalities at the mesoscale. She is recipient of the NSF CAREER Awards from the Ceramics program, and the IEEE UFFCS Ferroelectric Young Investigator Award.

Prof. Bassiri-Gharb has been the President of the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society (2018 and 2019) and is currently the President-Elect of the IEEE Council on Radio Frequency Identification. She serves on the technical program committee and advisory board for several scientific conferences including the IEEE International Symposium on Applications of Ferroelectrics, the Piezoresponse Force Microscopy and Polar Phenomena at the Nanoscale Workshop, and the International Symposium on Ferroic Domains. At Georgia Tech, she is affiliated with the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, the Center for the Science and Technology of Advanced Materials and Interfaces, and the Center for Machine Learning. She serves on the advisory board of the Materials Characterization Facility and is the elected Chair of the Faculty Grievance and Status Committee.

 

Prof. Martin Mourigal

Prof. Martin Mourigal joined the School of Physics as an assistant professor in 2015 and was promoted to associate professor in 2020. Mourigal received a materials engineering degree from École des Mines de Nancy (France) in 2017 and a Ph.D. in physics from EPFL (Switzerland) in 2011. He completed his training with a postdoctoral stint at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore). Mourigal's curiosity-driven research focuses on magnetic quantum materials such as spin-liquids, frustrated magnets, and spin-orbital systems. His team investigates these oxide and halide materials using scattering techniques, particularly neutrons, in projects funded by a Department of Energy and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. Mourigal serves as co-director of the Georgia Tech Quantum Alliance, a seed-program funded by Georgia Tech's Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology. He chairs the User Group for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's two neutron sources, where he also acts as a spokesperson for project teams designing new beamlines. To date, Mourigal's educational efforts focused on undergraduate-level electromagnetism and solid-state physics courses, training undergraduate and graduate students in his laboratory, and broadening participation in condensed matter physics by mentoring early-stage scientists during short stays in his laboratory and at ORNL.

 

Prof. Eric M. Vogel

Prof. Eric M. Vogel is currently Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Associate Director of Shared Resources for the Institute for Materials (IMat), Deputy Director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), and Adjunct Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His group performs broad-based research regarding the synthesis, structure, properties, and applications of electronic and nano-materials. Prof. Vogel has authored over 210 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited over 11,000 times. As Associate Director of IMat since 2012, he founded and leads Georgia Tech's Materials Characterization Facility. As Deputy Director of IEN since 2015, he is responsible for catalyzing large-scale, interdisciplinary research activities in the area of micro-/nano-electronics and photonics at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) where he was also Associate Director of the Texas Analog Center of Excellence and led UTD’s portion of the Southwest Academy for Nanoelectronics. Prior to joining UTD in August of 2006, he was leader of the CMOS and Novel Devices Group and founded the Nanofab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, for which he received a Department of Commerce Silver Medal. He received the Ph.D. degree in 1998 in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Physics from North Carolina State University and was recently honored with induction into NCSU’s Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame.