Professor Hisham Massoud of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering in Durham, N.C., has been awarded the 2006 Electronics and Photonics Division Award of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) for his work on ultrathin silicon dielectric films. Massoud said these films need to be increasingly thinner for new generations of integrated circuits to continue to be made smaller and faster. The ECS award was established in 1968 to encourage excellence in electronics research and outstanding technical contributions in electronics science and technology. Massoud received the award at the 209th annual ECS meeting, being held this week in Denver. In addition to his position at Duke, Massoud has served as a research scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.; the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina; the Hewlett-Packard Integrated Circuits Business Div.; and the Max-Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.