Leburton: Gregory Stillman Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Professorship: Gregory Stillman Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
An internationally respected researcher, gifted educator, and caring mentor, University of Illinois Electrical & Computer Engineering Professor Greg Stillman was an expert on semiconductor materials and devices, lasers, and light emitting and detecting devices. He established evaluation techniques for compound semiconductor materials that are now used universally. His data on the prototype III-V semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) established a standard for evaluating carrier transport in all III-V semiconductors.
A distinguished graduate of the University of Nebraska, Stillman served as an officer and pilot in the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command from 1958 to 1963. A skilled pilot, he flew high-performance aircraft like the KC-135 on missions to refuel B-52 bombers. After leaving the Air Force, Stillman entered the U of I's electrical engineering graduate program, earning his MS in 1965 and his PhD in 1967 under the direction of ECE Professor Nick Holonyak Jr. In 1967, he went to work with the Applied Physics Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
In 1975, Stillman joined the Illinois ECE faculty, where he would remain the rest of his career. In 1986, he was appointed the first director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Compound Semiconductor Microelectronics on campus. He also led the effort that brought $14 million in state funding to the Illinois campus for construction of the Microelectronics Laboratory—one of this country’s finest university-based facilities for III-V compound semiconductor research.
Stillman is remembered most fondly as a gifted educator and caring mentor. He guided the PhD work of more than 40 students, who themselves are now well known in the optoelectronics and wireless communications fields.
Stillman was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1985, the highest distinction the nation accords an engineer. A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), he was a recipient of the IEEE Jack Morton Award and the GaAs Symposium Award with the Heinrich Welker Gold Medal. He was a permanent member of the U of I Center for Advanced Study—the highest honor for campus faculty. He also received the College of Engineering Tau Beta Pi Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award and the ECE Department’s Outstanding Teaching Award for Faculty. He died July 30, 1999 at the age of 63.
Faculty: Jean-Pierre Leburton
Professor Jean-Pierre Leburton is a world leader in semiconductor nano-physics and quantum device simulation. He is well-known for his work on the optical properties of quantum structures, particularly for his theory of the index of superlattices refraction. At the frontiers of solid-state electronics, his research focuses on quantum wires and quantum dots for which he predicted and interpreted a wide range of physical effects with applications in electronics and photonics.
He and his students are currently involved with the theoretical investigation of single-electron charging effects and single-electron spin manipulation in GaAs quantum dots and silicon devices for quantum information processing, transport in semiconductor wires, and DNA translocation through semiconductor nanopores.
Professor Leburton received his PhD from the University of Liege (Belgium) in 1978. Before joining the University of Illinois in 1981, he worked as a research scientist with the Siemens A.G. Research Laboratory in Munich, Germany. He is presently a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He is also a full-time faculty member in the Computational Electronics Group at the Beckman Institute. He is the author and co-author of more than 250 technical papers in books and international journals. In 1993, he was awarded the title of “Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques “ by the French Government. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the American Physical Society (APS), the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).