Executive Committee Vote
The AACG Executive Committee nominally consists of 24 elected members with four year terms, half of which are elected every two years. This year twenty members have been nominated and agreed to run for twelve spots. All members of the AACG may vote. Please vote once for up to twelve nominees. Results will be announced as soon as possible thereafter. Bios for each nominee are available below. Voting is now closed.
Zak Al Balushi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has led a research group since 2019 focused on crystal growth and integration of electronic and quantum materials. His work spans vapor-phase and solution-based crystal growth techniques to enable large-area, manufacturable strategies for next-generation device applications. He earned his B.S. (2011) and M.S. (2012) in Engineering Science, and Ph.D. (2017) in Materials Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University under Joan M. Redwing. He subsequently held the Resnick Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship in Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology with Harry Atwater. Zak has been an active leader in the materials community, serving on the editorial board of Communications Materials and as a Principal Editor for the Journal of Materials Research. He has organized seven MRS symposia on 2D materials and served as Meeting Chair of the 2023 International Materials Research Congress in Cancun, Mexico. His contributions have been recognized with several prestigious honors, including the MRS Graduate Student Gold Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Micron Corporation Early Career Award.
Mercouri G. Kanatzidis is chemist recognized for his transformative work in solid-state chemistry and materials science. He is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, and a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and has made major contributions to synthesis of materials, crystal growth, thermoelectrics, halide perovskites, and hard radiation detection. He is widely known for developing advanced synthesis methods that have led to the discovery of numerous functional materials. Kanatzidis has published over 1,600 papers, holds dozens of patents, and has received multiple honors, including the 2023 Centenary Prize and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.
Sumeet Bhagavat is the Director of Quantitative Silicon Research at GlobalWafers. He leads a global group of numerical simulation and AI/ML engineers who are leveraging conventional machine learning, deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial neural networks, computational fluid dynamics simulations, thermal simulations, thermo-mechanical simulations, silicon defect dynamics simulations and structural simulations to improve yields, throughput and product quality in silicon crystal growth, wafering, wafer thermal, and silicon on insulator (SOI) processes. For the last 12 years, he has been heavily involved in GlobalWafers’ Czochralski silicon crystal growth research and development projects. He has successfully led projects in which AI/ML and numerical simulations were leveraged to optimize crystal quality, point defects profiles, resistivity uniformity, process throughput, energy usage, and impurity concentrations in silicon crystal growth. He has 35+ patents/pending patents and 5 journal publications. He holds a PhD (2005) in Mechanical Engineering from Stony Brook University.
John F. Mitchell is an Argonne Distinguished Fellow and Senior Scientist in the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his A.B. from Cornell University in 1987 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1993 for theoretical studies of defect structures and order-disorder transitions of early transition metal chalcogenides. From 1993-1996, he was a DOE Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne's Materials Science Division, where his research involved synthesis of superconducting cuprates and then synthesis and crystal growth of rare earth manganites exhibiting colossal magnetoresistance. Appointed to the Argonne staff in 1996, his current research emphasizes strategic synthesis, crystal growth, and structural studies of correlated electron and magnetic transition metal oxides and chalcogenides and topological matter using neutron and x-ray scattering. Most recently, he has emphasized use of high-pressure environments for floating zone growth of oxides. Mitchell is author or co-author of nearly 400 peer-reviewed articles. He has coordinated the development team for a high-resolution powder diffractometer at the Advanced Photon Source and led the Argonne major initiative in materials design and discovery since 2011. He was awarded the DOE Early Career Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1999 and 2000, respectively. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and the American Physical Society and has served on the Chair line of the APS Division of Materials Physics.
Govindhan Dhanaraj has been an active member of AACGE since 2005. He was the Conference Program Co-Chair of ACCGE/OMPVPE-2021. Dr. Dhanaraj has co-organized the Industrial Crystal Growth symposium as well as SiC and Ga2O3 Materials and Devices symposium multiple times under the ACCGE/OMVPE and ICCGE conferences, delivered invited lectures, and also served as session chair in several conferences. Dr. Dhanaraj has published “Springer Handbook of Crystal Growth (2010) 1820 pages” which was also re-published in 6 volumes series by Springer Publishers. He was the Vice President at Pallidus, Inc. Albany, NY focusing on the development of high-quality 6 inches Silicon Carbide (SiC) single crystals for power device applications. He also served as the Manager of Crystal Growth Technologies at ARC Energy (Nashua, NH) where he developed (co-inventor of a patented technique called CHES) a technology for producing very Large Size Sapphire Crystals for LED lighting applications. This technology was further advanced, and over 300 kg size automated boule growths were demonstrated repeatedly with in-situ monitoring. At Morgan Advanced Ceramics, Dr. Dhanaraj was also involved in CVD growth of large size (over 150 kg size) thick impervious SiC ceramic panels and cylinders. Currently, Dr. Dhanaraj is the project lead of 8 inches dia bulk SiC crystal growth at Coherent Technologies. During his 25+ years of experience in crystal growth research, he has developed many different optical, laser and semiconductor bulk crystals using various crystal growth techniques.
Irina Mnushkina received her Ph.D. in Physics/Material Science from Dnepropetrovsk University, Ukraine, where she continued working as a research scientist until 1991. Later that year she and her family emigrated to the United States. From 1991 to 1994 Irina worked as a visiting scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working with BaTiO 3 crystals and High Temperature Superconductors. She is the author of more than 30 publications and 5 patents. In 1994 Irina was hired as a Product Manager at Deltronic Crystal Industries Inc., where she later became the Director of Crystal Growth Department, growing nonlinear optical materials by Czochralski and other techniques. In 2000, Dr. Mnushkina joined Integrated Photonics Inc. (IPI). Since then, Irina was involved in the development of Liquid Phase Epitaxial Crystal growth and characterization of Magneto-optical Materials. In 2018 IPI became part of II-VI, a global leader in engineered materials, optoelectronic components and optical systems, which later was acquired by Coherent. Currently Irina is Principal Engineer at Coherent, responsible for growth of gallium gadolinium garnets and supporting production of LPE materials. Dr. Mnushkina is an active member of the Crystal Growth community, having served as the President of the local Mid-Atlantic Section of AACG, and, currently, as a member of executive Committee of AACG.
Kristen Fichthorn is the Merrell Fenske Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Professor of Physics at the Pennsylvania State University. She received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. She spent one year as an IBM Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining Penn State. Professor Fichthorn’s research is primarily in multi-scale materials simulation, in which she develops and applies theoretical techniques ranging from quantum density functional theory to molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo methods, and continuum theories to a diverse array of fundamental problems involving fluid-solid interfaces. Applications lie in nanoscale materials, thin-film and crystal growth, colloidal assembly, and wetting. In addition to being recognized by Penn State for her outstanding research and teaching, she is the recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1990), an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (1998), she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2011), a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2017), a recipient of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2019), a recipient of the Langmuir Lectureship of the American Chemical Society (2020), and a recipient of the Kavli Foundation Frontiers of Materials Lectureship (Spring 2025 Symposium X) of the Materials Research Society.
Shariar Motakef is the Founder, Senior Engineer and President of CapeSym. He received his BS (1978), MS (1980) and PhD (1984) from MIT. He worked as a postdoc with the late Professor Witt of the Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, and later joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT as an Assistant Professor in 1985, and was promoted to Samuel C. Collins Associate Professor in 1988. At MIT, his focus was on developing computer modeling and simulation tools for crystal growth processes. He founded Cape Simulations, Inc. in 1992 and left MIT to run the company in 1993, providing turnkey simulation tools and engineering consulting services to about 80 companies, US government labs, and universities. In 2005 Cape Simulations changed its name to CapeSym to better reflect its diverse activities. Since then, Dr. Motakef has been involved with a myriad of projects in crystal growth, more recently focused on growth of very large scintillators and semiconductors primarily for detection of gamma and neutron ionizing radiation. CapeSym is now a 15-person company with a number of R&D projects involving thick films and bulk crystals, supported by DoD, DHS, and DoE. It is also a leading commercial provider of scintillator crystals and detectors for radiation detection, as well as semiconductors for Photon Counting Computed Topography applications. Shariar Motakef has about 150 journal publications and conference presentations.
Maria Hilse received her B.S. and M.S. in Experimental Physics from Humboldt-University of Berlin in Germany. She joined the Paul-Drude-Institute for Solid State Electronics in 2008 to work on the synthesis and characterization of III-V semiconductor nanowires and ferromagnet-semiconductor nanowire heterostructures by molecular beam epitaxy. In 2015, Dr. Maria Hilse received her Ph. D. in Experimental Physics from Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany. She then moved on to join the 2D Crystal Consortium (2DCC), a Materials Innovation Platform of NSF at Penn State as postdoctoral scholar and continued her career at Penn State as Assistant Research Professor for the 2DCC and X-ray Diffraction expert for the Materials Characterization Laboratory at Penn State. The overarching goal of her research is the synthesis and characterization of one- and two-dimensional nanostructures, films and heterostructures by molecular beam epitaxy for applications in energy and environment. She is interested in the experimental study of fundamental growth kinetics of novel materials at the atomic scale to further the understanding of their unique properties and their possible applications. Her research targets electronic and optoelectronic properties arising from strong coupling mechanisms that enable quantum effects, which can be found inherently in materials or engineered by constraining materials in 1D or 2D, manipulating surface configurations and stacking.
Biography of Andrew Novoselov, Ph.D. I hold a Ph.D. in crystal chemistry from the Institute of Electronic Materials Technology (Warsaw, Poland) and completed a postdoc at Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan). Since moving to the U.S. in 2009, I’ve led crystal growth initiatives at Rubicon Technology, IPG Photonics, and now Coherent Corp. (formerly II-VI), where I grow sapphire crystals for optical windows and garnets for Faraday rotators. My work has advanced large-scale sapphire production, record-low absorption LBO crystals, and helped creating strong high-tech manufacturing jobs. I’ve presented at major international crystal growth conferences and published over 50 peer-reviewed papers. Beyond technical contributions, I’ve actively supported the crystal growth community by initiating crystal growth internship programs at IPG Photonics and Coherent. I also maintain regular updates on job opportunities at Coherent through AACG’s website. I am running for the AACG Executive Board to strengthen collaboration between academia and industry to meet the demand for skilled crystal growers. I am fully committed to participating in Executive Committee meetings and contributing to conference planning with enthusiasm.
Siddha Pimputkar (PhD 2012 from UCSB under Nobel Laureate Shuji Nakamura and Jim Speck) is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Lehigh University. He has published 3 book chapters, and 28 papers, holds 4 patents (with 17 additional filed patent applications), and given 31 invited talks. He has received 4 NSF grants (including the NSF CAREER Award), an ARL-DEVCOM grant, a DARPA grant, and multiple industrial grants (total ~ $7.0m). His chief expertise lies in the bulk single crystal growth and epitaxial growth of next-generation semiconductors (traditional III-N, cubic/hexagonal BN and novel ternary nitrides for (opto-)electronic & quantum devices such as power/RF electronics and optical emitters) and with the development of advanced equipment, such as high gas pressure systems with in-situ monitoring capabilities, needed to synthesize novel nitrides. Dr. Pimputkar’s primary focus is on studying relationships between crystal growth conditions, growth mechanisms, and material defects to grow materials suitable for fundamental material property exploration and device demonstrations/applications. Dr. Pimputkar is an active member of AACG, on the AACG executive committee, and conference co-chair for the upcoming ACCGE/OMVPE 2025. He is a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), on the Scientific Advisory Council Member to IKZ (Germany) and has been awarded the Young Scientist Award from AACG, the Lehigh Early Career Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Lehigh’s Rossin Award for Community Builder Award and for Excellence in Research Scholarship and Leadership. He has been named the Harold Chambers Junior Professorship and the P.C. Rossin Assistant Professorship.
Darrell Schlom is the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University. After receiving a B.S. degree from Caltech, he did graduate work at Stanford University receiving an M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering. He was then a post-doc at IBM’s research lab in Zurich, Switzerland in the oxide superconductors and novel materials group managed by Nobel Prize winners J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. In 1992 he joined the faculty at Penn State in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where he spent 16 years before joining the faculty at Cornell in 2008. His research involves the heteroepitaxial growth and characterization of oxide thin films by reactive molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE), especially utilizing a ‘materials-by-design’ approach to discover materials with properties superior to any known. He has published over 750 papers and 14 patents resulting in an h-index of 125 and over 75,000 citations. Dr. Schlom's work has been recognized by the highest awards for materials discovery by five relevant societies: the Frank Prize from the International Organization for Crystal Growth, the MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society, the McGroddy Prize from the American Physical Society, the Thornton Memorial Award from the American Vacuum Society, and the John Bardeen Award from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, the American Vacuum Society, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Kevin L. Schulte is a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2008 and 2009, respectively, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014 where he studied defect incorporation in III-V materials grown by hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE). At NREL he studies the epitaxy of III-V materials and solar cells, seeking to make them more efficient and more cost effective via high throughput manufacturing by HVPE. His research interests are materials for energy, fundamentals of epitaxial growth, and epitaxial reactor design. He has an established track record of service to the Association, serving on the AACG Executive Committee since 2021 and participating in the organization of ACCGE/OMVPE 22, 23, and 24. He’s also served as the editor of the AACG Newsletter since 2021.
Jong Seto is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at the Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona. His research focuses on the molecular interactions at the mineral-organic interface across multiple length-scales. Beyond his foundational contributions to delineating mineralization and crystallization model systems in situ, he has applied advanced methods to a wide range of uses utilizing CaCO3-based mineralization to “real-world" applications, including the geoengineering of arid, heat-prone regions, advanced weathering of agricultural-dependent lands, reuse of produced water for hydration, as well as greenhouse gas emission (GHG) sequestration and storage. He is a regular contributor to the American Association of Crystal Growth and Epitaxy meetings as well as the Gordon Research Conferences in Biomineralization, and Crystal Growth and Assembly. In addition to his academic collaborations, his industrial outreach includes joint projects with Blue Planet Systems on carbon-negative concrete, Stanford based Sunscreen Tropospheric Aerosol Injection (TAI), as well as collaborations with BASF on CaCO3-based agricultural coatings. As climate change and impacts on the environment are having noticeable effects on our current society, a broader focus on how to counter the root causes of climate change is being prioritized to better enact the understanding of molecular mechanisms in mineralization to the geologic scale. Dr. Seto's fundraising and support at the recent 28th AACG-West Meeting at Fallen Leaf, CA enabled for a record number of attendees (almost 100) and a record amount of support from private and public funds.
Professor Moneesh Upmanyu received his Bachelors of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay) in 1995 and Ph.D. in Materials Science & Engineering from University of Michigan in 2001. He then held Postdoctoral Fellow appointments in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department and the (then) Princeton Materials Institute, and subsequently in the Computational Materials Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was on the faculty of the Division of Engineering at Colorado School of Mines from 2002 to 2008 before joining the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University in 2009. Prof. Upmanyu heads the Group for Simulation and Theory of Atomic-scale Material Phenomena (stAMP). His research interests are in multi-scale mechanics and physics in several classes of material systems, from atoms to continua. Focus areas range from interfacial and surface phenomena in crystalline materials, structure-property relations in low-dimensional nanostructures, atomistics of crystal growth, mechanics of thin sheets, and self-assembly of semi-flexible and elastically stiff filamentous aggregates as well as their networks. His group's principal expertise is in atomic-scale computational techniques such as molecular dynamics and Monte-Carlo based methods and their links with coarse-grained and continuum theoretical and computational frameworks. His research has been published in several journals such as Science, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Royal Society Interface, Acta Materialia, Journal of Applied Physics, and has been featured in several society newsletters. He is the recipient of several awards including the Northeastern University Research Team Award, Outstanding Young Scientist Award (Recrystallization & Grain Growth Congress), and MRS Graduate Student Medal.
Jani Jesenovec is a SME in the growth of crystals for a variety of applications, including nonlinear optics, optoelectronics, semiconductors, and transparent wide bandgap semiconductors. He obtained his Bachelor's in Physics from Central Washington University (2018), where he studied materials for magnetic memory storage. His Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at Washington State University (2022) focused on Czochralski growth of the wide bandgap semiconductor gallium oxide, and characterization through a wide variety of optical, structural and electrical techniques to understand defects, doping, alloying and photoconductivity. Jani is currently a principal scientist at BAE Systems' FAST Labs, conducting crystal growth and vertical integration of crystals for a variety of nonlinear optical, optoelectronic, and semiconductor applications. Through this position, he is able to work with academic, industry and small business partners to sell crystals for research and development purposes.
Tania Paskova is a distinguished scientist with over 30 years of combined experience in academia, industry and government agencies in multi-cultural environment. Following a 4-year tenure at NSF as Program Manager for Electronic and Photonic Materials program, she is currently serving as a Program Manager for Electronic Sensing program in Army Research Office, while maintaining some research engagement at NC State University. Her expertise spans from semiconductor physics, material synthesis by different growth techniques to advanced characterization of optical, electrical and structural properties of bulk semiconductors, thin epitaxial films and quantum well structures for electronic, photonic and sensing applications. Her most notable scientific accomplishments are related to development of crystal growth for various device applications through innovative nucleation platform; development of doping approaches of III-V materials and understanding the electrical and thermal transport, leading to establishment of commercially relevant methods for production of bulk and epitaxial materials and exploring anisotropy effects in nitrides with nonpolar and semipolar alignment and low-symmetry materials. Dr. Paskova is editor of two scientific books; author of 15 book chapters and reviews, and co-author of more than 260 scientific papers. She is a Member of the Executive Committee for American Association of Crystal Growth (AACG).
Edgar van Loef is a Chief Scientist with Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc. (RMD). At RMD, he leads the Organic Laboratory team and is in charge of the Bridgman crystal growth research effort. Dr. van Loef received his M.S. in Condensed Matter Chemistry in 1998 from Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 2003. At Utrecht University, his work involved the powder syntheses of fluorides and oxides and the study of the VUV energy levels of trivalent rare-earth compounds. At Delft University of Technology, his research into novel inorganic halide scintillators led to discovery of LaBr3:Ce3+, one of the few inorganic scintillators with sub-3% energy resolution. Dr. van Loef joined RMD, Inc. in 2003 as a Staff Scientist in the Research Department. At RMD, he worked on the solution growth of organic crystals such as diphenylanthracene and phenylcarbazole, and was involved in the Bridgman crystal growth of LaBr3:Ce3+, CeBr3 and Cs2LiYCl6:Ce3+. More recently, he invented novel thallium-based binary and ternary halide scintillators for radiation detection applications, grown by the Vertical Bridgman method. His areas of expertise are in Solid State and Organic Chemistry, Crystal Growth, and Radiation Detection. Finally, he is the author of more than 100 professional publications and several patent applications.
Hongping Zhao is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio). Before her current role, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio). She earned her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) in 2011. Prof. Zhao's research expertise lies in wide bandgap and ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor materials and devices. Her current work focuses on the MOCVD synthesis and device physics of III-nitrides, II-IV-nitrides, gallium oxide, among others. She is currently an Associate Editor for Applied Physics Letters and the Journal of Crystal Growth. Additionally, she actively serves on the technical program committee for several conferences, including ICMOVPE (International Conference on Metal Organic Vapor Phase), IWGO (International Workshop on Gallium Oxide), EMC (Electronic Materials Conference), LEC (Lester Eastman Conference), IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting), and etc. Prof. Zhao also served as the General Conference Chair for GOX2024 and is currently serving as the steering committee for GOX2025.