Juan Borja, a graduate student in Prof. Joel Plawsky's Research Group in CBE has won the Best in Session Award at TECHCON 2012 held in Austin Texas in September 2012. TECHCON is an annual event where the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) showcases the best of its sponsored research. Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) is the world's leading technology research consortium, with member companies and university research programs that span the globe.
Juan received the award for his paper "Bipolar Applied Field Experiments to Characterize Dielectric Relaxation and Describe Charge Transport in Low-k Materials". The award is a unique one for chemical engineers since the bulk of SRC research is sponsored through physics, electrical engineering, and materials engineering departments. Also what makes this award special is that this is the second year in a row that Juan has won this award.
Prof. Plawsky's and Juan Borja’s research sponsored by SRC focuses developing new electrical testing methods and fundamental charge transport models to describe the mechanisms responsible for dielectric degradation in microelectronic systems. These experiments and calculations have the potential to predict the lifetime of microelectronic devices. Prof. Plawsky’s boarder research focuses on colloid science and transport and interfacial phenomena. Over the past two years two of his experimental modules have gone in NASA’s space shuttles.