Presenter

Thomas Theis is Executive Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative (CNI) and Professor in Electrical Engineering in the Fu Foundation School of Engineering, Arts and Sciences. He joined IBM at the T.J. Watson Research Center in 1978 to study electronic properties of materials, and held various senior management and executive positions from 1984 through 2015. In the late 1990’s, as Senior Manager, Silicon Science and Technology, he coordinated the transfer of copper interconnection technology from IBM Research to the IBM Microelectronics Division. The replacement of aluminum chip wiring by copper was an industry first, the biggest change in chip wiring technology in thirty years. As IBM’s strategist for exploratory research worldwide from 1998 to 2012 and as Director, Physical Sciences from 1998 to 2010, he conceived and initiated successful research programs in silicon nanophotonics and Josephson junction-based quantum computing, and championed research in nanoelectronics, exploratory memory devices, and applications of information technology to address societal needs in energy, infrastructure, and the environment. From 2010–2012, as Program Manager, New Devices and Architectures for Computing, he organized research projects aimed at greatly improved energy-efficiency in computing. On assignment from IBM to the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) from 2012–2016, he led SRC’s Nanoelectronics Research Initiative, a private-public partnership funding university research aimed at new devices and circuits for computing. He joined Columbia University in April of 2016 to manage and lead CNI operations and work with faculty and university research offices to identify and develop concepts for major new research programs.