24 April 2008

NUS researcher awarded IBM Faculty Award

	RESEARCH EXCELLENCE: Prof Charanjit Singh Bhatia is the first NUS faculty member to receive the IBM Faculty Award.

Prof Charanjit Singh Bhatia, NUS, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has recently received the IBM Faculty Award 2008 for his project on Fabrication, Characterization and Performance of Thin film Si Photovoltaic (PV) cells.  He is currently working on a Joint Study Agreement (JSA) with IBM which would facilitate additional research projects where NUS can collaborate with a team of world-class research scientists at IBM's T J Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, NY.

The IBM award is a competitive worldwide programme intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organisations. It also aims to promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies strategic to IBM. The Awards are cash awards granted annually, with maximum award of US $40,000 per year. This award is a first for NUS faculty.

Said Prof Bhatia:  "I am very happy to receive this award on behalf of NUS and especially happy for our graduate students who will now have a chance to work on cutting edge research & collaborate with some of the top notch scientists from IBM research center in New York. Additionally this may also help Faculty of Engineering (FOE) in further establishing closer links with industry.

"This award is a testimony of the growing reputation of NUS as a centre of excellence in research & higher education. This is the result of the efforts of NUS Management Team who all are working hard to make NUS a world class institution so that it may become a player at a global scale. This award is yet another important step in that direction. I am also working on other projects in the JSA which are aimed at understanding the fundamental physics of growth of ultra thin films (~ monolayers) and patterning very small features for applications in Spintronics, future data storage devices and many other applications.”

STATE-OF-THE-ART: Prof Bhatia spearheaded the set-up of the Information Storage Materials Laboratory (ISML) with high-tech facilities such as the Sputter Deposition System (above).

Prof Bhatia was appointed Temasek Professor with the NUS Faculty of Engineering in 2001. An eminent researcher/advance technologist who has worked with IBM and later with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), he also spent 20 years collaborating with UC Berkeley, CA & other premiere research labs worldwide in Data Storage research. He was the first researcher from industry to be appointed as the Temasek Professor in ECE where he spearheaded the setting up of a new state-of-the-art clean room facility, Information Storage Materials Laboratory (ISML) in ECE Department, NUS. ISML has enabled extensive research to develop capabilities in the fabrication of small features for studies for Spintronics and Magnetic media applications.

For the last 15 years Prof Bhatia has been a team leader of the US based Information Storage Industry Consortium (INSIC), Extremely High Data Recording (EHDR)’s Tribology project. He was recently invited to lead the tribology roadmap for the data storage industry in US and Japan. He is currently helping to define research projects for 10 Terabit/in2.

He has numerous patents, publications & awards for his research in Data Storage and  is  now  applying  this  knowledge in  the  development of  photovoltaic cells.

Prof Charanjit Singh Bhatia joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS & IMRE on lst August 2007.