Malliaras, Tennant To Lead Cornell NanoScale Facility

George Malliaras, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell University, has been named the L.B. Knight Director of the Cornell NanoScale Facility (CNF), starting Aug. 15. Don Tennant, now at Lucent Technologies of Murray Hill, N.J., will begin as CNF's director of operations on the same date. CNF provides facilities for the manufacture and testing of submicroscopic devices for astronomy, plant pathology, materials science, physics, chemistry and the life sciences. Currently, some 350 Cornell researchers and a similar number of outsiders use the facility. The appointments are the result of more than a year's search in collaboration with researchers who use the facility, which is largely supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Malliaras succeeds Sandip Tiwari, who served as CNF director from 1999 until 2005, when he left to become director of the nanoscale manufacturing facilities consortium National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. Malliaras said he plans to expand CNF's efforts to work with biologists and the medical community. Malliaras' research focuses on organic electronics, the use of organic materials in place of such traditional semiconductors as silicon to create electronic devices, including organic LEDs, organic thin-film transistors and organic photovoltaics. Before joining Cornell in 1998, he spent two years at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is the recipient of the NSF Young Investigator Award and the DuPont Young Professor Grant, is an editor for the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics and serves on the editorial board of Sensors. Tennant has been a Lucent scientist and affiliated with Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. He is considered to be an expert in nanofabrication and electron-beam lithography and has held national policy roles.