Steven R. J. Brueck, Ph.D.
Distinguished and Professor Emeritus
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Director Emeritus, Center for High Technology Materials
The University of New Mexico
2010 STC.UNM INNOVATION FELLOW
As the recipient of the first annual STC.UNM Innovation Fellow Award in 2010, Dr. Brueck was the stand-out choice for exemplifying the spirit of innovation at UNM. As the most prolific inventor at UNM, his technologies continue to receive multiple patents each year, with many more pending patents in the pipeline. The technologies are licensed to major companies and promising start-ups.
Dr. Brueck’s nanotechnologies span the fields of semiconductors, biotechnology, lighting, and materials science. His main research focus is on nanolithography, which is a way of creating patterns that approach molecular scales, and on the use of large-areas of nanostructures for applications in photonics, electronics and sensing. The uniqueness and usefulness of his research is that it extends over the entire process of nanolithography—from creating the nano tools and lenses used to make the patterns to the chemical substances used on the substrates.
This process has led to the development of the next generation of semiconductor chips and is enabling new technologies in the areas of nanophotonics (plasmonics, photonic crystals, metamaterials), nanofluidics for biological applications such as third-generation DNA sequencing, nanoscale epitaxial growth, and directed self-assembly. A very recent development is the use of a chirped nanoscale grating to fabricate an integrated spectrometer-on-a-chip with vastly improved performance over any other demonstrated devices. The manufacturing process is silicon-integrated-circuit compatible and can be manufactured at low cost, ultimately leading to widespread applications of optical spectroscopy.