Plenary Speakers

Dr. Chia-Hong Jan is a former Intel executive. He had the position of Director of High Speed and Low Power Technology Integration, and Intel Senior Fellow, the highest technical rank at Intel (he was the first individual from Taiwan). The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Dr. Jan among its 2017 class of fellows. The honor recognizes Jan for his leadership in developing low power logic technologies for System-on-Chip (SoC).

In his 34 years tenure at Intel, he assumed various technical and leadership roles in 0.8µm, 0.55µm, 0.35µm, 0.25µm, 0.18µm, 0.13µm, 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 22nm, 14nm and 7nm advanced CMOS technologies. He started with the engineering group leader for rapid thermal processing and advanced silicon deposition engineering, working on the development of novel salicides, including Titanium, Cobalt and Nickel technology, advanced gate oxide processes, source and drain junction engineering, and epi SiGe technology for strained silicon. As the engineering manager of 90nm interconnect integration, his team was credited the first in industry to research, develop and ramp of low-k ILD materials for high-performance microprocessors. He was one of the co-inventors for the industry first SiGe strained technology. Jan was the program manager of 65nm low-power chipset process technology, and 45nm, 32nm, 22nm and 14nm SoC process technology for Intel® Atom™ processor–based low-power products, including micro-servers, tablets, smartphones, and chipsets, wireless, RF and FPGA products.

Jan has 162 U.S. Patents in the fields of semiconductor process, materials and integration.

Dr. Jan has published more than 50 technical papers. He has 7862 citations with H-index of 42 and I10 Index of 93. His paper of the development of industry first FinFET System-on-Chip (SoC), presented in IEEE IEDM’12, was selected as one of the 60 most influential papers in the IEDM conference history at IEDM 60th year anniversary (San Francisco, 2014). Two other Intel papers received the recognition were from Gordon Moore (Moore’s Law, 1975) and K. Mistry (1st High-k/Metal Gate, 2007)..

He received three Intel Achievement Awards (highest individual recognition at Intel). Dr. Jan is the recipient of the 2008 Distinguished Achievement Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Jan has been active in the EDS community, including IEDM committee, CSTIC Plenary (Shanghai, 2016), VLSI-TSA keynote (Taiwan, 2018), NATEA (San Jose, 2022) keynote, and EDL reviewer.

Jan holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and MBA from National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He also earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.​

Harry Atwater is the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Atwater’s scientific effort focuses on energy sciences and nanophotonic light-matter interactions. His work spans fundamental nanophotonic phenomena and applications, including active wavefront shaping of light using metasurfaces, optical propulsion of lightsails, quantum and 2D nanophotonics as well as solar energy conversion, on earth and in space.

Atwater was an early pioneer in nanophotonics and plasmonics and gave a name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. Currently Atwater directs the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), a Department of Energy Hub program for solar fuels, and is a PI of the Caltech Space Solar Power Project. He was also the founding Editor in Chief of the journal ACS Photonics. Atwater is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of APS, MRS, SPIE and Optica, a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher from 2014-2025, and is recipient of numerous awards, including the 2021 von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society.

Professor Jian-Wei Yeh explored and researched high-entropy alloys and related materials since 1995. He published more than 320 SCI papers, including 260 papers on high-entropy materials. He named and defined high-entropy alloys, proposed four core effects and established fundamental principles of high-entropy alloys. He used casting, wrought, powder metallurgy and coating routes to show the feasibility, promising properties and potential applications of high-entropy alloys. He also extended the high entropy concept to ceramics and polymers and advocated high-entropy materials. He is the chair of International High Entropy Materials Consortium. From the 2025 annual report by Stanford University, his scientific influence in 2024 ranks world’s second in the field of Materials. He also has 50 patents on traditional materials and high-entropy materials, and further transferred at least 10 patents to related industry for producing alloys with excellent properties.

Eduard Arzt is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the fields of bio-inspired adhesive surfaces, sustainable materials systems, thin film mechanics, and materials for extremely high temperatures. As Scientific Director, he turned the INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken into one of the leading materials research centers. Previously, he was director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, then the most highly cited research center for metals and ceramics. As Distinguished Visiting Professor he modernized the graduate Program in Materials Science and Engineering at the UC San Diego. As distinguished Tan Chin Tuan Engineering Fellowship at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, he collaborated with the Mechanical Engineering Department on applications of adhesives. Arzt is a member of three national academies, i.e. the Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the US National Academy of Engineering in Washington. He is the recipient of prestigious research awards such as the Leibniz Prize, the highest German research award, and four European ERC Grants. Arzt is Emeritus Editor-in-Chief of the leading journal Progress in Materials Science and co-founder of INNOCISE, a start-up company in the field of bio-inspired robotics.

R. Stanley Williams primary scientific research during the past fifty years has been in the fields of solid-state chemistry, physics and materials, and their applications to technology, especially in the areas of computing, communication and sensing. In 2008, a team of researchers he led announced that they had built and demonstrated the first intentional memristor, the fourth fundamental nonlinear electronic circuit element complementing the capacitor, resistor and inductor that had been predicted theoretically by Prof. Leon Chua 37 years earlier. He is presently the director of the US DOE Energy Frontier Research Center reMIND (Reconfigurable Electronic Materials Inspired by Nonlinear Neuron Dynamics) that includes researchers from TAMU, Sandia National Labs, the National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.

Schuh's research is focused on structural materials including metals and ceramics, in which he seeks to control disorder in material microstructures for the purpose of optimizing mechanical properties. His research group uses experiments, analytical theory, and computer simulations to explore the processing-structure-property relationships in structural metals and materials. His more than 250 research articles have been published in academic journals such as Physical Review Letters, Science, and Acta Materialia.

A seasoned entrepreneur, Schuh has cofounded a number of metallurgical companies. His first MIT spin-out company, Xtalic Corporation, commercialized a process from Schuh’s laboratory to control the internal structure in metal electroplated coatings down to the nanometer scale, producing exceptional mechanical and functional properties. These nanocrystalline coatings provide wear and corrosion resistance to metal surfaces and are widely used in enterprise and personal electronic devices. Schuh also cofounded Desktop Metal, an additive manufacturing company producing 3D metal printers that address a range of markets with an emphasis on production scale.