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The POLY Member Spotlight was created to highlight excellent members of the polymer science community. Our division's members are involved in diverse research areas throughout the industrial and academic sectors, and we look forward to recognizing a wide-range of these talented polymer scientists and sharing their current research.
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Meet Our Featured Member
Qinghuang Lin, ASML
Dr. Qinghuang Lin is now the Director of Technology Development Center at ASML, a global leader in semiconductor lithography equipment, in San Jose, California, USA. Before he joined ASML, Dr. Lin was a Research Staff Member, a Senior Manager and an IBM Master Inventor at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA. He has more than 15 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, all with IBM. He has held a variety of positions in semiconductor research, development, engineering, management and technology strategy for IBM's 0.25 um to 5 nm CMOS technologies, IBM's 512 Mbit & 1 GBit DRAM, novel memory technologies and other exploratory research.
Dr. Lin has more than 90 issued US patents with more than 70 pending US patents. He is a recipient of 25 IBM Invention Plateau Achievement Awards. A frequent organizer and speaker of professional conferences, he is the editor or co-editor of 6 books and 9 conference proceedings volumes and author and co-author of more than 70 technical papers. Dr. Lin is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS and a Guest Editor of the Journal of Materials Research focus issue on "self-assembly and directed assembly of advanced materials." He has delivered more than 50 keynote or invited lectures worldwide. In 2002, Dr. Lin received an IBM Research Achievement Award for "invention, development and implementation of 248nm bilayer resist technology in manufacturing." This IBM bilayer resist technology was also part of the 40 years of innovations in semiconductor technology that won IBM 2004 US National Medal of Technology -- the highest honor awarded by the President of the United States to America's leading innovators. In 2015, Dr. Lin, along with colleagues, received an IBM Research Division Outstanding Achievement Award for "Spin Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM)" and an IBM Research Division Achievement Award for "193nm Negative-Tone Development Process for Advanced Memory and Logic Fabrication." In 2016, Dr. Lin, along with colleagues, received an IBM Research Division Achievement Award for "Contributions to Fundamental Understanding of Line Edge Roughness in Semiconductor Technology."
In 2014, Dr. Lin was named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS Fellow). In 2015, he was named a Fellow of the Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE), American Chemical Society (PMSE Fellow). He was elected to a Fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE Fellow) in 2017. In 2018, he received the Industrial Polymer Scientist Award from the American Chemical Society Polymer Chemistry Division and will be inducted as a POLY Fellow in 2019.
A member of AAAS, ACS, MRS, SPIE and New York Academy of Sciences, Dr. Lin currently serves as Chair of the American Chemical Society: Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE) division and a member of the PMSE Executive Committee. He was Chairman of SPIE Advanced Etch Technology Conference in 2015 and 2016, a member of the Executive Committee of the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium and a past chairman of the SPIE Resist Conference. Dr. Lin also served on the Electorate Nominating Committee, Industrial Science and Technology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Materials Secretariat of American Chemical Society and Co-chair of PMSE Fellows Selection Committee. Dr. Lin has been active in serving the scientific communities, having served as conference chair, co-chair, vice chair, organizers and organizing committees of more than 60 international conferences. He is a member of two engineering honor societies: Tau Beta Pi and Alpha Sigma Mu.
Dr. Lin received his B.E. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin prior to joining IBM. He also completed a MicroMBA Program taught by faculty members from the Stern School of Business at New York University and Columbia University Business School at IBM Watson Research Center.
Read POLY's interview with Qinghuang Lin below.
How long have you been a POLY member?
I have been a POLY member since 1992 when I attended my first ACS National Meeting. It has been a fast quarter of a century!
What are you working on now?
I recently joined ASML, a global leader in semiconductor lithography equipment in San Jose, California after more than 20 years at IBM. I continue to push the frontier of technology to make smaller, better, more powerful and energy-efficient microchips.
The microchips in the latest iPhones are fabricated with the so-called 7-nm node technology. The 2-nm node microchips are on the industry technology road-map. I am continuously amazed by the innovations and the ingenuity in the microelectronics industry to push the technology forward.
Polymers (and materials in general) have played and will continue an important role in the microelectronics industry.
What do you find most challenging about your work?
An explosion of information that is very challenging to keep up with. I am paranoid about missing out on truly innovative and disruptive technologies.
Tell us about someone who has influenced your work.
Over the years, I have been fortunate to benefit enormously from interactions with advisors, mentors, colleagues and friends, a habit encouraged and instilled by my Ph.D. advisor. My post-doc mentor guided me into the microelectronics industry.
In college, I admired Marie Curie for her dedication to science.
What might someone be surprised to know about you?
I play volleyball given how tall I am. At one time, our team won three consecutive championships at the IBM intramural volleyball tournaments.
What do you think will change about polymers over the next five years?
That is a hard question for me to answer as I am not particularly good at forecasting the future. I cannot see through the crystal ball even with my glasses on. I do have a couple of items that I hope our community will focus on:
1. Polymers and biology: DNA is a quintessential polymer. Biopolymers such as DNA could inspire us to make polymers with an exquisite control of hierarchical structures and properties that might not be possible otherwise. The new biomaterials made this way could have profound implications for healthcare, neuroscience, and information technology, to name just a few.
2. Sustainability: As polymer scientists and engineers, we have a responsibility to think and act thoughtfully about the science we discover and the technology we create -- both the positive impact and the possible negative effects on the society and our planet. I would love to see our community come up practical solutions to some of the pressing sustainability challenges of our time, such as plastic recycling and non-fossil fuel as polymer feed-stock, in the next five years.
I am optimistic that someone in our community will come up new discoveries and innovations that will blow my mind in the next five years.
What do you do when you aren't working?
Like many others in our profession, work consumes most of my time. I enjoy time with
my family and have made time for my kid's after school activities such as soccer, Boy Scouts,
Destination Imagination, etc. I have also volunteered for National Engineer's Week, IBM
Watson Family Science Saturday where I have taught Kitchen Chemistry and Polymers, etc. In
my 25th hour of the day, I enjoy classical music, reading, running and, of course, volleyball.
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