Joseph W. Lyding

Joseph W. Lyding is the Robert C. MacClinchie Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University in 1983. He joined the Illinois faculty to work with Nobel laureate John Bardeen on the 1D charge-density-wave problem. During that time, he developed the first scanning tunneling microscope in the Midwestern United States, which he used to create the atomic resolution hydrogen resist process for patterning silicon surfaces. In these experiments, he also discovered the giant deuterium isotope effect that is now being used in large-scale chip production to reduce hot-carrier degradation in CMOS technology. More recently, he developed a method to improve the performance of carbon nanotube transistors, developed a method to deposit nanostructures onto atomically clean surfaces, and he invented a technology for producing ultra-sharp hard-coated electrically conductive probes. This latter technology has been commercialized by Tiptek, LLC, a company he co-founded, to produce the probes for semiconductor wafer probing and scanned probe microscopy.

Lyding was selected as a UIUC University Scholar, and he is a Fellow of the APS, IEEE, AVS, and AAAS. He received the 2012 IEEE Pioneer in Nanotechnology Award, the 2013 AVS Nanotechnology Recognition Award, the 2013 Research Excellence Award from the Nano/Bio Interface Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the 2014 AVS Prairie Chapter Award for Outstanding Research, the 2014 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, and the 2021 International Association of Advanced Materials Medal.