Alfred University alumnus Sandwip Dey to deliver 2025 John F. McMahon Lecture

Alfred University alumnus Sandwip Dey, M.S. '80, PhD '84, professor of materials science and engineering at Arizona State University, will deliver the John F. McMahon Memorial Lecture at 11:20 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, in Holmes Auditorium, Harder Hall, on the Alfred University campus.

Dey's lecture is titled "Ceramics in MOSFET-enabled electronics." According to the lecture abstract, "The electronics industry is an exceptionally innovative, interdisciplinary R&D-intensive, and one of the most advanced that humans have developed. It is highly reliant on semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs), especially the ubiquitous metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), working in tandem with essential passive components and interconnects within advanced electronic packages."

The electronics industry, Dey notes, enables artificial intelligence, telecommunications and cloud networking (including internet-of-things or IoT), infotainment, healthcare, banking & security, transportation, manufacturing, and high-performance computing "revolutions." "As the foundation of consumer, industrial, aerospace, and military systems, the industry, with its complex global network, is slated to grow to multi-trillion dollars by 2030," the abstract states.

The lecture will examine "the roles of major industrial contributors in the aforesaid supply chain ecosystem since their performance is an excellent indicator of the overall economic climate."

Dey earned a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in India and went on to earn master's and doctoral degrees in ceramic engineering from Alfred University. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dey joined the Arizona State University (ASU) faculty in 1987. Currently, he is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in SEMTE, Ira Fulton Schools of Engineering, Arizona State University and is affiliated with the Center for Solid State Electronics Research and the Center for Interventional Biomaterials.

His research and teaching on materials (namely, semiconductors, ceramics, metals), processing science, and devices for electronics, life sciences, and energy encompasses thin-film processing (sol-gel, ALD, PLD, and MOCVD) science; integration of functional materials on Si, GaAs, Sapphire, and GaN, and device fabrication; device characterization, physics, and reliability, and heterogeneously-integrated packaging. Dey's work has been funded by DARPA, ONR, ARO, NSF, NIH (NCI), Caltech, Intel, Motorola, McDonnell Douglas Electronic Systems Company, General Electric, Infineon, Applied Materials, ASM America, and other global electronics industries.

Dey has over 400 peer-reviewed publications and presentations, 20 technical reports, two book chapters, and six patents, and has received the President's Fund Award from Caltech and the Rainer Zuleeg Award from the International Symposium on Integrated Ferroelectrics organization. He was the Editor of Electro-ceramics in the Encyclopedia of Advanced Materials and Technology (Elsevier, 2001) and is the Co-Chair of the IEEE-International Symposium on Integrated Functionalities component.

The John F. McMahon Memorial Lecture Award is presented annually to an outstanding ceramic engineer. The award was created by alumni in honor of the late John F. McMahon, an alumnus, a professor and finally, dean of what is now the Inamori School of Engineering.