IBM Research’s Stephen M. Rossnagel Elected President of the AVS for 1999
N/A (January 21, 1998) – In January the American Vacuum Society announced that Stephen Rossnagel, Research Staff Member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, will hold the office of president-elect of the AVS for 1998, and will succeed Jerry M. Woodall of Purdue in 1999. His election as president will allow him to continue his service to the AVS since joining twenty years ago as a student at Penn State.
After receiving his bachelors and masters of science from Penn State in 1977, Rossnagel worked on plasma-surface interactions at Princeton. He then returned to school to receive his Ph.D. from Colorado State University in 1982. His work for IBM research has centered on process technology for interconnect and packaging applications, based mostly on magnetron sputtering. This work included inventing hollow cathode-enhanced magnetrons and collimated sputtering, as well as understanding gas rarefaction and various optical and process characterizations. Currently Rossnagel is focusing on the development of ionized magnetron sputtering.
A member of the AVS since the mid 70’s Rossnagel has served on numerous committees including the Chair of the Publications Committee from 1991 through 1995 and Chair of the 1996 annual conference at which he was responsible for the upgrade to a fully electronic abstract submission. Rossnagel received the Peter Mark Memorial Award from the AVS in 1990, given annually to recognize outstanding theoretical or experimental work by a young scientist or engineer, and was made an AVS Fellow in 1994.
Rossnagel appreciates the diversity of sciences the AVS has recently supported, such as biomaterials interfaces, nanostructures, and flat-panal displays. As president he would like the AVS to continue to grow into these newer fields without displacing focus on the more traditional areas of vacuum technology.
Source: IBM