Prof. Roger T. Howe

Roger T. Howe is the William E. Ayer Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He received a B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 and 1984. After faculty positions at Carnegie-Mellon University and MIT from 1984-1987, he returned to UC Berkeley where he was a Professor until 2005.

His research interests include micro electromechanical system design, micro- and nano-machining technologies, and applications in energy conversion and biomolecular sensing. A focus of his research has been processes to fabricate integrated microsystems, which incorporate both silicon integrated circuits and MEMS. Prof. Howe has made contributions to the design of MEMS accelerometers, gyroscopes, electrostatic actuators, and microresonators.

Prof. Howe served as Co-General Chair of the IEEE MEMS’90 Workshop in Napa, California and was the Technical Program Chair of Transducers ’03 in Boston. He is an editor of the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 1996, was co-recipient of the 1998 IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2005 for his contributions to MEMS processes, devices, and systems. He co-founded Silicon Clocks, Inc., a start-up company commercializing integrated MEMS resonator-based timing products, which was acquired in April 2010 by Silicon Laboratories, Inc. In December 2010, he became the Faculty Director of the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility (SNF) and in September 2011, he became Director of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), which is an NSF-funded collaboration of 14 academic nanofabrication facilities across the U.S.