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.
John Dallesasse
John Dallesasse is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Dean in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he’s been for 13 years. He also has over 20 years of industry experience in technology development and executive management, having led technically diverse and geographically distributed engineering teams.
Prior to joining UIUC he was the Chief Technology Officer, Vice President, and co-founder of Skorpios Technologies where he was responsible for developing innovative methods for heterogeneous integration of compound semiconductors with silicon. His technical contributions include, with Nick Holonyak, Jr., the discovery of III V Oxidation, which has become an enabling process technology for the fabrication of Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) for optical networking, 3D imaging, and LIDAR applications.
His research group at UIUC works on novel methods for heterogeneous integration using epitaxial transfer which have been applied to the fabrication of VCSELs and other photonic devices on silicon, on mode control methods which have been used to provide record single-mode powers on conventional VCSEL structures, and on mid-IR emitters using quantum transition structures within a transistor structure (the transistor-injected quantum cascade laser or TI-QCL).
John has over 100 publications and conference presentations, and 52 issued patents. He serves or has served as the Chair of the Steering Committee for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, the Chair of the Steering Committee for the IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, as the Vice President of Technical Committees for IEEE-EDS, as the Vice President of Strategic Directions for IEEE-EDS, and as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Optica.