Prof. Gerhard Klimeck elected AAAS Fellow
Gerhard Klimeck, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS fellow is a lifetime honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. This year, 489 members have been awarded this distinction.
Klimeck joined Purdue in 2003 and is the director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, which operates nanoHUB, the world’s premier online resource for nanoelectronics offering electronic device simulations and educational resources. He established nanoHUB’s architecture and analytics cyberinfrastructure and drove its expansion from 500 to more than 2 million users. Klimeck also developed simulation applications that have served more than 205,000 users in 172 countries. These applications are a new type of publication listed in Web of Science and Google Scholar. In October 2020, nanoHUB was honored with the R &D World Magazine’s R&D 100 Award. This prestigious award was established in 1963 and recognizes the most revolutionary technologies introduced to the market over the past year.
Klimeck’s election as an AAAS fellow recognizes his achievements in developing some of the most realistic simulations of ultra-small transistors. His research played a major role in establishing the NEGF (non-equilibrium Green’s function) formalism as the method of choice to model electron flow at the nanometer scale and the tight-binding method as the preferred atomistic basis set. The widespread use of NEGF in research and advanced technology development that we see today owes much to the vision of Klimeck and his 25-year effort to bring this vision to fruition.
Klimeck also invented the NEMO software tool suite, which sets the modeling standard for today’s industrial nano-scale devices. His tools and model approaches are now used in industry to design transistors. His NEMO tool alone powers nine different nanoHUB applications used by more than 30,000 users who have done over 600,000 simulations. More than 300 publications and over 4,000 students using the software in nearly 400 classes illustrate the broad impact of these NEMO-based nanoHUB tools.
He is a fellow of the following organizations: Institute of Physics (elected in 2011); American Physical Society (elected in 2011); and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (elected in 2012). He is a research prize winner and member of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany (2019).
Klimeck’s prior positions include Texas Instruments and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology. He has been granted five U.S. patents with two additional patents pending and disclosed.
Klimeck earned his Diploma in Electrical Engineering, with highest distinction, from Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, in 1990, and in 1994, he received his PhD in electrical engineering from Purdue University.