2025 CSW Award Recipients

Chris G. Van de Walle is a Distinguished Professor of Materials and the inaugural recipient of the Herbert Kroemer Endowed Chair in Materials Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UCSB in 2004, he was a Principal Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986, and was a postdoc at IBM Yorktown Heights (1986-1988) and a Senior Member of Research Staff at Philips Laboratories in Briarcliff Manor (1988-1991). He has published over 450 research papers and holds 24 patents. Van de Walle is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the APS, AVS, AAAS, MRS, and IEEE, as well as the recipient of a Humboldt Award for Senior US Scientist, the APS David Adler Award, the AVS Medard W. Welch Award, the TMS John Bardeen Award, the MRS Materials Theory Award, and the APS Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics. He is a recipient of a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, and has been recognized as a “Highly Cited Researcher”.

Professor Van de Walle develops and employs first-principles computational techniques to model the structure and behavior of materials. Early in his career he developed a model for predicting heterojunction band offsets, which is still widely used. In the 1990s he started making seminal contributions to the understanding of doping and defects in electronic materials. He challenged the conventional wisdom by showing that impurities rather than native defects were responsible for unintentional doping of wide-bandgap semiconductors such as GaN and ZnO. He subsequently addressed causes of efficiency loss in light emitters by developing accurate methods for calculating Auger-Meitner and Shockley-Read-Hall recombination. He has also been applying these techniques to the understanding and prediction of spin qubits and single-photon emitters for quantum information science. Recently he has also provided new insights into polarization which are benefiting wurtzite- structure ferroelectrics.

Miguel Urteaga received his Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Physics from Simon Fraser University (Canada) in 1999 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He joined Teledyne Scientific Company (formerly Rockwell Science Center) in 2003, where he is currently the Director of Foundry Products and Services and manager of the advanced device development group. His research is focused on the development of high-speed/high-performance compound semiconductor transistor technologies, primarily in the InP material system.

Dr. Urteaga has led the development and commercialization of Teledyne’s THz-class bandwidth InP HBT IC technologies. MMIC demonstrations in these technologies have included: a static frequency divider with record clock frequency (205 GHz); and fundamental oscillators, amplifiers and transmitter/receiver circuits operating at >600 GHz. The technologies have demonstrated numerous records for power amplifier output power and power added efficiency between 140-300 GHz, including a 0.5W power amplifier at 150 GHz and a 220 GHz power amplifier with 25% PAE. Teledyne’s InP HBT technologies are offered as IC Foundry processes and are used in commercial test and measurement equipment as frontend elements and millimeter-wave driver amplifiers. Recent research efforts have focused on the heterogeneous integration of compound semiconductor IC technologies with silicon through methods such as: monolithic growth, micro-transfer printing and hybrid wafer bonding. Dr. Urteaga served as the technical program chair and general chair for the Device Research Conference (DRC) in 2010 and 2011, respectively, and as the technical program co-chair for the 2012 Indium Phosphide and Related Materials Conference (IPRM). Dr. Urteaga has authored or co-authored over 200 conference and journal publications and 10 patents. He received the Teledyne Scientific and Imaging Technologist of the year award in 2013 and was named IEEE Fellow in 2023 for contributions to terahertz heterojunction bipolar transistor integrated circuit technology.

Srabanti Chowdhury received her M.S. (2008) and Ph.D. (2010) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her doctoral research led to the development and first demonstration of vertical GaN-based transistors (CAVETs) as power switches for power electronics applications. Following her Ph.D., she joined Transphorm (now part of Renesas), then a startup in Goleta, Santa Barbara, where she led the development of the first 900V GaN HEMT- on-Silicon technology, contributing towards its commercialization. She returned to academia in 2013, holding faculty positions at Arizona State University (Jan 2013 – July 2015) and the University of California, Davis (Aug 2015 – Dec 2019), before joining the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in January 2019, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She has been a visiting professor at Nagoya University, Japan, since 2021.

Her device research with wide bandgap and ultra-wide bandgap materials focuses on power and RF electronics applications, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and power density at the device level that can be translated to system-level innovation. She translated the CAVET technology to industry in 2024, after almost 16 years of research. Since 2013, she has expanded her research to diamond materials — both as semiconductors and for thermal management — developing low- temperature growth processes for device integration. Her work on achieving record-low thermal boundary resistance between diamond and with GaN using SiC interlayer, was recognized with the Technical Excellence Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) in 2023. Since 2020, she has broadened her thermal research to include Silicon, demonstrating large benefits through Diamond integration. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, NSF CAREER Award, and AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2015; the Young Scientist Award at the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS) in 2016 for her research on CAVETs; and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Physics in 2020.

Yuhao Zhang is currently a Full Professor with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the

University of Hong Kong (HKU), Hong Kong SAR, China. Before joining HKU, he was the Shirish S. Sathaye Associate Professor with Virginia Tech, leading the power semiconductor research at the Center for Power Electronics Systems, the largest academic research center in power electronics in the U.S. He received his Ph. D. and S. M., both in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 and 2013, respectively. He has authored over 190 journal papers and conference proceedings and 2 book chapters and holds 7 granted U. S. patents. His work has been cited by over 10,000 times with a h-index of 53. He has delivered over 60 invited and plenary talks at preeminent conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics and is a member of the Power Devices and ICs Technical Committee of the IEEE Electron Devices Society. He received the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2017, two IEEE George Smith Awards (best paper award of the year in IEEE Electron Device Letters) in 2019 and 2023, three Technical Highlights of IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in 2020, 2021 and 2024, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2021, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2023.

Yuhao has made pionneering contributions to the development of multidimensional power devices – including superjunction, multi-channel and FinFET – in GaN and Ga2O3. His group has reported many first device demonstrations and record performances (e.g., 10,000 V devices and vertical superjunctions in GaN and Ga2O3), breaking device performance beyond the conventional material limits. Yuhao also pioneered the development of vertical GaN power devices on Si substrate, which has been widely followed by academia and industry. Yuhao’s group also made pioneering contributions to the packaging and circuit-level reliability studies of GaN and Ga2O3 devices. His group is the first to demonstrate packaging as an effective solution to the thermal challenges in Ga2O3, as well as report the circuit-level avalanche and short-circuit robustness in GaN and Ga2O3 devices. Many switching reliability works from his group have achieved wide industrial impact. For example, the soft- switching loss test methodology developed by his group was adopted by JEDEC JEP200 standard for industrial device qualifications and evaluations.