Keynote Lectures

Farrokh Ayazi, Georgia Tech, USA

Farrokh Ayazi is the Ken Byers Professor of Microsystems in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.  He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. His main research interest lies in the area of Integrated Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS and NEMS), with a focus on micro/nano-mechanical resonators and advanced inertial sensors.

Dr. Ayazi was the co-founder and CTO of Qualtré, a spin-out of his research laboratory that commercializes bulk acoustic wave silicon gyroscopes for high precision sensing and personal navigation applications.  Qualtré was acquired by Panasonic in 2016.

The author of over 200 refereed technical and scientific articles, Dr. Ayazi is a fellow of IEEE and holds 50 patents. He was the general chair of the IEEE Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) conference in 2014, held in San Francisco, CA.  

Jon Cooper, University of Glasgow, UK

Jon Cooper holds The Wolfson Chair in Biomedical Engineering and is a University Vice Principal. He is an EPSRC Research Fellow and holds a European Research Council Advanced Programme Grant. His major research interests are in ultrasonics, microfluidics and medical diagnostics. Recently he has combined these three aspects using phononic structures to shape acoustic fields and control the flow of fluids, with applications in biomedical sensing and drug delivery.

Jon also has a track record of spin-out and translation of devices into practice.  In one example, he is developing, rapid, zero-cost “origami paper” diagnostics are being trialled in rural Uganda as species-specific DNA sensors to identify the cause of infectious disease and inform treatment “in the field”. Further examples of industrial translation include forming three spin-out companies in the areas of drug discovery and diagnostics. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK’s national academy of engineering) as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland’s national academy of arts, humanities and sciences).

Victor Plessky, Resonant Inc., Switzerland

Prof. Victor Plessky has worked in the field of SAW technology for more than 40 years. He is known as one of the authors of the STW (Surface Transverse Waves), and as the author of the so called “Plessky equation” describing the dispersion of leaky SAWs in periodic gratings, presented by paragraphs in D. Morgan and K. Hashimoto books on SAW technology.  Currently V. Plessky is developing high performance SAW filters, SAW-ID tags and sensors. 

In total he has published about 300 papers on SAW and authored more than 20 patents.  Prof. Plessky has been Visiting Professor for many years in HUT, Helsinki, in Uppsala University, in EPFL, Lausanne, and in Freiburg University. During years 2010-2012 worked at FEMTO, Besançon, in the project “Chaires d’excellence” dedicated to the development of UWB SAW devices. He has supervised 15 Ph.D. theses.   From 2003 he was an owner and director of consulting company GVR Trade SA (Gorgier, Switzerland) active in design of SAW devices, software development, consultations, etc. Recently (July 2016), the company became wholly owned subsidiary of Resonant Inc., S. Barbara, and now concentrates on TC SAW device development. V. Plessky continues research in area of wireless SAW sensors in frames of Swiss-Lithuanian project Eurostars E!10640 UWB_SENS.

Tuomas Pensala, VTT, Finland

D. Sc (Tech.) Tuomas Pensala is a Principal Scientist in the MEMS team at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He received the M.Sc. degree in Engineering Physics from the Helsinki University of Technology in 2000 and the D. Sc. (Tech.) degree in Applied Physics from the Aalto University in 2011. He has worked for the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland since 1998 on topics including microacoustics, RF filters, MEMS and PiezoMEMS resonators and sensors, and thin film technology. He has authored and co-authored more than 50 scientific papers and presentations on thin film, RF and MEMS devices and contributed to more than ten patent families.

Paulo V. Santos, Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik, Germany

Paulo V. Santos received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. After post-doctoral appointments at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California, USA and at the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany, he joined the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik in Berlin, Germany in 1997 as a senior scientist. His research interests include optical spectroscopy and mechanical properties of semiconductor nanostructures. He is the author of approximately 300 publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and patents

Johan Christensen, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Dr. Johan Christensen is a research fellow at the Instituto Gregorio Millán Barbany, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Broadly speaking, he is interested in wave physics and the theoretical description and numerical modeling of acoustic and mechanical metamaterials. The science of plasmonics in structured media also belongs to his line of research. In 2010 he was awarded his PhD at the Autonomous University of Madrid followed by a postdoctoral stay at the Spanish National Research Council until 2012 in Madrid as well. He was hired as an assistant research professor at the Techinical University of Denmark in Copenhagen until mid 2016. Dr. Johan Christensen is an international key player in acoustic and mechanical metamaterials and has given numerous plenary, keynote and invited lectures, chaired and organized conference sessions and was a member in technical and advisory boards of many international organizations and conferences. Given his remarkable track record he has obtained numerous awards and grants such as Marie-Curie Doctorate fellowship, Carlsberg fellowship, young elite researcher prize from the Danish Research Council, Ramon y Cajal fellowship and an starting grant from the European Research Council. These grants and prices amounted to a total of approximately 2.5m€ of funds raised.