Panel on Careers and Post-Graduate Studies in Materials Science

Panelist Biographies

Adrienne Stiff-Roberts is Jeffrey N. Vinik Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, where she is also Director of Graduate Studies for the University Program in Materials Science and Engineering. Stiff-Roberts received a BS degree in physics from Spelman College (1999), a BEE degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (1999), an MSE degree in electrical engineering (2001) and a PhD degree in applied physics (2004) from the University of Michigan. Her current research interests include organic and hybrid thin-film deposition by resonant-infrared matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation (RIR-MAPLE); materials characterization of organic and hybrid thin films; and the design, fabrication and characterization of organic and hybrid optoelectronic devices, especially infrared photodetectors, photovoltaic solar cells and multi-functional sensors.

Wenbing Hu is a Senior Process Integration Engineer at Applied Materials, Inc., where he contributes to the field of next-generation display technologies with process integration and device innovations.  He received his BS degree in microelectronics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (2010) and PhD degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan (2016). His research focused on solution-processed oxide electronic materials and devices. After school, Hu worked at LAM Research Corporation from 2016 to 2019 as a process engineer, developing state-of-the-art dry etch processes and hardware for 3D NAND memory chip manufacturing. Later, he moved on as Process Integration Engineer at Royole Corporation.

Samuel Graham, Jr. is the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. Chair of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  His research is focused on the development of advanced electronic devices for future applications in RF communications, power electronics and energy systems.  He also holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech, a joint appointment with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and he is a visiting professor at Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan.  He is also a member of the Emerging Technologies Technical Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

David Estrada is the Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies, the Advanced Manufacturing Deputy Director of Academic Research at the Idaho National Laboratory, and an associate professor at the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering, Boise State University. He is a veteran of the U.S. Navy, serving onboard the USS Curtis Wilbur as part of the forward deployed 7th Fleet. He earned his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2013) where he was the recipient of the NSF and NDSEG Graduate Fellowships. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Innovator of the Year, National TRiO Achiever and NSF CAREER awards. His research interests are in the areas of emergent semiconductor nanomaterials and bionanotechnology.

Mona Ebrish is a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Lab investigating wide-bandgap semiconductors for high-voltage applications. She is a Fulbright Scholar who received her BS degree in electrical engineering (2007) from the University of Tripoli. She earned her MS degree and PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota (2011, 2015).  Ebrish’s PhD dissertation is one of the earliest studies on utilizing the quantum capacitance effect in graphene for sensing applications. Later, she spent four years at IBM as an advisory research scientist working on Si-CMOS scaling challenges. Her research resulted in a dozen U.S. patents and over 20 papers and abstracts in major journals and conferences.

Michael Abraham is a staff semiconductor materials scientist/process engineer at Lockheed Martin, Santa Barbara Focal Plane, where he works on high end infrared cameras. He completed his BS degree and MS degree at Cornell University, both in materials science and engineering. For one year he worked at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and then joined The Pennsylvania State University materials science and engineering department. After completing his PhD degree at Penn State, he started his job at Lockheed Martin in 2017.