Staff
Professor Ian W Boyd BSc PhD CEng CPhys FIEE FInstP
MCN Director
Professor Ian W Boyd was appointed to the position of Director, Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN) on 1st October 2009. He comes to the MCN with 30 years of experience in lasers, nanotechnology and materials science. He was previously a cofounder and a former director of Nanoelectronics at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) and also headed the Materials & Devices group as Professor of Electronic Materials in Electronic & Electrical Engineering at University College London (UCL).
Professor Boyd obtained first class BSc (1979) and PhD (1982) degrees at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh where he received the Watt Medal for distinction and class prize for best student. Subsequent to working in Medical Physics and as a Mircoelectronics Device Engineer, he became a research scientist at the University of North Texas, prior to obtaining tenure at UCL. He has contributed significantly to research at international level in several fields, having presented more than 50 invited papers, written and/or edited 8 books, and published more than 300 papers in major scientific journals. He has served on numerous advisory committees and as a consultant world-wide, as president of the European Materials Research Society (EMRS) in Strasbourg where he is currently a member of the executive board and general co-chair of the 2010 international conference. He is also a member of the board of Directors of the Materials Research Society (MRS), a fellow of both the Institute of Physics (IoP) and the Institute of Electrical Technology (IET).
Professor Boyd holds Honorary Professorial Chairs on several continents and was recipient of the Senior Yarwood medal for pioneering contributions to thin film growth by the British Vacuum Society in 2005.
Steve Walker
Facility Manager
Steve brings to the MCN over 30 years engineering experience with almost 20 years of this specifically relating to research technical support and facilities management in the UK. His career in academia began in 1991 upon his appointment as a Research Technician within the High Energy Particle Physics group at the University of Sheffield. This role encompassed several areas of responsibility including GaAs and Diamond Radiation detector development and fabrication for the ATLAS project at CERN, Geneva as well as readout electronics and beamline experimental and technical support. Whilst also in the Department of Physics he became involved in the support of the UK Dark Matter program, and provided significant support and day-to-day operational management for the underground remote facility at Boulby Mine.
In 1996 he moved to the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Sheffield to take on the role of Facility Manager for the EPSRC National Centre for III-V Technologies. This position encompassed operational management, facility development, OH&S, financial management, equipment procurement and installation. This culminated in a design and build of a new facility in 2006 housing 3 MOVPE Reactors, 2 MBE Reactors, Device Fabrication Laboratory, Electron Microscopes, EBL, characterisation (electrical and optical), FIB and TEM.
This new facility became part of a strategic development at the University to build a multi-disciplinary research campus known as North Campus bringing together researchers and academics for disciplines as diverse as Semiconductor Electronics, Physics, Materials Engineering, Molecular Biology, Tissue Engineering, Ground Water Pollution, Bio Photonics and Virtual Reality all housed within The Kroto Research Institute (Patron Sir Harry Kroto Nobel Peace Prize Winner). As part of the vision The Kroto Innovation Centre and The Sheffield Bio-incubator were established under the management banner of North Campus to enable technology based start up companies to obtain access to business support and scientific advice and assistance. As part of this collaborative banner, Steve became Site Superintendent of North Campus and took on overall operational management of the site and facilities established within it.
Steve graduated in 1999 from Sheffield Hallam University with a 2:1 degree in Electronic Systems and Information Engineering leading to Chartered Engineer Status in 2005.
Matteo Altissimo
Research Assistant
Matteo graduated from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2001 with a 1st class honours degree in Material Science. He gained his PhD from the Politecnico di Milano in 2006 with a thesis entitled "Diffractive Optical Elements for Short Wave Radiation". He moved to Australia during his PhD and designed an X-ray Lithography Beamline for the Australian Synchrotron in 2005. He became a post doctoral researcher at CSIRO in 2006, with a special interest in spectral imaging of trace elements in biological samples. This tied in with his long term interest in nanofabrication due to common techniques such as key optical elements in spectral imaging fabricated by e-beam or x-ray lithography. Matteo was responsible for the care and development of the Cambridge EBMF 10.5 Electron Beam Lithography system at CSIRO and brings a wealth of experience to the position of E-beam researcher at the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN). Matteo has been a core contributor to the MCN throughout its development since 2006 and was instrumental in the selection of the Vistec EBL tool.
Matteo's main research interests in the area of nanofabrication are X-ray and neutron optics in addition to plasmonic structures.
Manoj Sridhar
Research Assistant
Manoj completed his Bachelor's degree in Physics at Florida Institute of Technology in 2003, and obtained his Ph.D. (Physics) from Vanderbilt University in 2008. His Ph.D. thesis was titled "Novel MOSFET-based fluidic sensors and simulations of thermal bubble nucleation in nanochannels". Manoj joined MCN in 2009 from the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science & Engineering (VINSE), where he was among the pioneering group of researchers and students to establish the interdisciplinary facility. He has been heavily involved in the planning and development of MCN, and is responsible for the flagship FIB-SEM instrument at the facility.
Manoj's main research interests include micro/nanofluidics and micro/nanofabrication of structures using ion and electron beam techniques.
Sasikaran Kandasamy
Research Assistant
Sasi received his Ph.D. degree from RMIT University with his major area of research being microelectronics especially field effect devices for high temperature gas sensing and metal oxide thin films. Prior to joining MCN he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for Monash University developing acoustic devices for micro-fluidic and bio-sensing applications. At the MCN, Sasi is in charge of the flagship Nano-imprint Lithography (NIL) and the Reactive Ion Etch (RIE) tools. In addition he is responsible for training and process support for MCN users in various nanofabrication areas, including photolithography, metrology and thin film deposition.
Zoran Vasic
Cleanroom Technician
Zoran graduated from Monash University (Clayton) in 1989 with a major in physics and shortly afterward commenced employment at the CSIRO, where he remained until 1999 investigating the application of RF glow discharge polymerisation to the development of biomaterials and a variety of technologies, including continuous-wear contact lenses, elastomeric sutures for vascular surgery and flexible thin film electronic components. He has co-authored journal articles in surface science and biomaterials and his experience extends to project management on a small scale, having become primary investigator in a commercial collaboration to develop RFID tag technology.
Zoran has furthermore obtained a graduate qualification from Monash University (Clayton) in mathematics and physics teaching at secondary level - professional skills he applied in an academically successful government school setting for several years before combining his scientific and educational experience in the physics teaching laboratories of Monash University.
In late 2008, Zoran commenced employment at the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN) in a fabrication and characterisation role within the cleanroom environment. During construction of the Centre he has been deployed at the La Trobe University School of Physics microfabrication laboratory, where he has concentrated on electron beam lithography (EBL) and the deposition of patterned diamond-like carbon (DLC) features for experiments in coherent X-ray science and surface probe microscopy. He has, in addition, taken the opportunity to further develop his expertise in the sputtering of ultra-thin metal film coatings, and been given responsibility for authoring the third-year microfabrication laboratory course material, as well as participating in instructing second-year students in the hands-on operation of a scanning electron microscope (SEM).
Lim Sim
Cleanroom Technician
Lim graduated from RMIT University in 2007 with a Masters degree in Electronics Engineering and has had a journal article published based on research from his Masters thesis entitled, “Nickel silicide thin films as masking and structural layers for silicon bulk micro-machining by potassium hydroxide wet etching”. He originally came from Malaysia to undertake a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering course in RMIT University in 2002-2005. Prior to joining Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN) in 2008, Lim was a recruitment consultant for the engineering industry in Melbourne. This enriching experience enhanced his corporate and communication skills, which Lim brings to his work at the MCN.
Being one of the first few staff members to join the MCN, Lim has been at RMIT University for work and training purposes in 2008, extending his experience in the operation of cleanroom and vacuum equipment and assisting in the laboratory’s research. Lim’s main areas of knowledge include photolithography, dicing and sputter/evaporation deposition.
Douglas Mair
Laboratory Technician
Douglas graduated in 1993 with a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Caledonian University in Scotland. He worked for Motorola’s semiconductor division from 1993 until 2006 in a number of roles. As device technician he looked after product yield and quality on a family of Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) products.
He moved into the role of Failure Analysis Engineer in 1997 to work on new product development, production yield improvement and analysis of failed products from safety critical applications. Douglas returned to Australia in 2006 and worked for Freescale Semiconductor as a Field applications engineer where he assisted customers with microcontroller based designs. He saw the chance to work for the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN) as an opportunity to expand his skills beyond semiconductors into the diverse field of nanofabrication.
