Full Announcement

As announced today, August 27, 2007 by Department Head Eric Grimson:

"Dear Colleagues,

I am very pleased to announce that Jesus del Alamo is the new co-holder of the Donner Chair.

The Donner Chair was established through a gift from the Donner Foundation, in 1958, making it one of the earliest endowed chairs at MIT. The original Donner chairs were established at five elite schools: MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. The initial Donner Chair at MIT was held by Claude Shannon, and subsequent chair holders include Marvin Minsky. The current Donner Professor of Science is Mark Kastner, Dean of Science at MIT. Jesus will hold the Donner Chair, jointly with Prof. Kastner.

Jesus received his undergraduate training at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (1980), and completed his M.S. (1983) and Ph.D. (1985) at Stanford in Electrical Engineering. From 1985 to 1988 he was a research engineer with NTT LSI Laboratories in Atsugi (Japan). He joined our faculty in 1988 and was appointed a Full Professor in 1997.

Jesus’ research has primarily focused on semiconductor devices and systems. He has worked on solar cells, bipolar transistors (BJTs), heterostructure field-effect transistors (HFETs), and metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) on a variety of materials systems: Si, SiGe, GaAs, InP, and more recently GaN. His work spans the topics of device technology, physics, modeling and reliability. He has been quoted as working on “extreme devices – electronic devices at the extremes of operation” such as very high power and voltage levels, and very small scales. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2005 for contributions to microelectronic devices.

In addition to his research contributions, Jesus is recognized as a superb educator. He has been a pioneer in novel uses of technology for teaching, such as his iLabs project, in which students from around the world can explore and test microelectronic elements and devices by using a Web based service that allows students to remotely use expensive test equipment in a live manner. This project has been utilized by students at universities in Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Britain, Greece, Singapore, Thailand and Sweden. In recognition of his educational accomplishments, Jesus has won the Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the H. E. Edgerton Junior Faculty Achievement Award, the Louis D. Smullin Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award, and the Amar Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2003, he was selected as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.

The department is delighted to see Jesus’ many accomplishments acknowledged through the Donner Chair."