The Materials Research Society (MRS) has named John A. Rogers, director of the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), to receive the Mid-Career Researcher Award for “fundamental and applied contributions to materials, mechanics designs, and assembly techniques for stretchable/flexible electronic systems.” Rogers will be recognized during the Award Ceremony at the 2013 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco. The Mid-Career Researcher Award, endowed by Aldrich Materials Science, recognizes exceptional achievements in materials research made by mid-career professionals.
Rogers, who holds the Swanlund Chair at UIUC with a primary appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, changed the way researchers think about the possibilities in the field of flexible/stretchable electronics. In particular, he established comprehensive routes to semiconductor devices and integrated systems that offer the operational performance of conventional, wafer-based technologies, but with the ability to bend, fold, twist, stretch, and wrap complex, curvilinear, and time-dynamic surfaces in ways that would otherwise be impossible.
By pioneering the use of assemblies of semiconductor nanostructures, Rogers enabled electronic/optoelectronic devices to be formed on amorphous, low-temperature substrates with performance that is superior, by several orders of magnitude, to that possible with alternative materials. The materials he used range from nanomembranes/ribbons of monocrystalline silicon and gallium arsenide to arrays/networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes as effective thin films for high-performance electronic devices.
Defining strategies to combine these classes of “hard” semiconductor elements with soft substrates (e.g., sheets of plastic or slabs of rubber), Rogers produced hybrid materials constructs with mechanical properties defined almost exclusively by the substrates. He demonstrated, for example, that ultrathin structures, in neutral mechanical plane (NMP) layouts, can impart significant levels of flexibility to materials that are intrinsically brittle, like Si and GaAs. He further showed that such structures can provide end-to-end stretchability. With this progress in materials and mechanics, Rogers invented new classes of deterministic assembly techniques that enable such circuits to be constructed at high throughputs and yields.
Among the most compelling application opportunities with this new class of electronics are in “tissue-like” systems that integrate non-invasively and intimately with surfaces of the human body (i.e., bio-integrated devices) and in devices that adopt biologically inspired layouts such as “eyeball” cameras that incorporate hemispherically curved arrays of silicon photodetectors to enable fields of view and levels of aberration that can only be realized in conventional planar systems by using multicomponent imaging optics. Rogers’ work is also realizing commercial success, including a sports monitoring device (joint with Reebok) that was announced in 2012.
Rogers holds over 80 patents and patent applications and has over 350 publications. He received his PhD degree in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His other honors include Fellow of several professional societies, including MRS; the MacArthur Fellowship; the Lemelson-MIT Prize; induction into the National Academy of Engineering; and a Junior Fellowship in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University.
