News Briefs

The American Ceramic Society, the European Ceramic Society and the Ceramic Society of Japan will host the first International Congress on Ceramics June 25-29 at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel in Toronto. More than 65 speakers will cover topics facing business, research and technology interests in ceramics and glass. Presenters will include keynote speakerKazuo Inamori, president, Kyocera Corp.; Satyam Cherukuri, president and CEO, Sarnoff Corp.; Joel P. Clark, professor of materials and engineering systems, MIT;; Professor Katherine Faber, Northwestern University; Professor Larry Hench, Imperial College of Science and Technology; Debra Kaiser, chief, Ceramics Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology; Henry Kressel, managing director, Warburg Pincus LLC; Rodney Lanthorne, president, Kyocera International Inc.; Lynette Madsen, ceramics program director at the National Science Foundation; Joseph A. Miller Jr., CTO, Corning Inc.; Joel Moskowitz, chairman, CEO and president, Ceradyne Inc.; and Shigeki Suzuki, general manager, materials engineering, Toyota Motor Co. Organizers said the event will focus on the vision of the industry's leaders, rather than on research. For more information, visit: www.ceramics.org/icc . . . mPhase Technologies, a telecommunications and nanotechnology company based in Norwalk, Conn., said a sensor it is developing could eliminate "pat downs," bag searches and resulting long lines at large gatherings such as sports events by enabling security personnel to detect hidden weapons without physical inspections. The sensors -- magnetometers built using a combination of MEMs and nanotechnology processes -- are about the size of the date on a penny but can sense metal objects at longer distances than current magnetometers (instruments for measuring the direction and/or intensity of magnetic fields), mPhase said. They will have applications in homeland security as an improvement in perimeter defense and commercial uses such as inexpensive navigation systems built into mobile phones, magnetic sensing security devices for household locks, radio frequency identification tags and noninvasive diagnostic medical procedures for detecting anomalies in red blood cells or brain activity, according to the company. . . . The Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) has appointed Betsy Weitzman as executive director of its Focus Center Research Program (FCRP), effective Jan. 1. The FCRP is a cooperative initiative among members of the US semiconductor equipment, materials, software and services industry and the US Department of Defense, through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Weitzman replaces Simon Thomas, who is retiring. She was formerly technology research director at Freescale Semiconductor Inc.'s Technology Solutions organization and was vice president and COO of Sematech as a Motorola assignee; before that, she held engineering and management positions at the Microelectronics Division and the T.J. Watson Research Center at IBM, where she began her career.