recipient of the 2005 National Materials Advancement Award from the Federation of Materials Societies, the 2005 Acta Materialia Inc. J. Herbert Hollomon Award, and the 2003 ASM-TMS Distinguished Lecturer in Materials and Society. For his pioneering work in analytical electron microscopy and solid-state diffusion, Dr. Romig received the Burton Medal from the Microscopy Society of America (1988); the K.F.J. Heinrich Award from the Microbeam Analysis Society (1991); the ASM Silver Medal for Outstanding Materials Research (1992); and the Acta Metallurgica International Lectureship (1993–1994). He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Lehigh University in 1975, 1977, and 1979, respectively.

Jeffrey J. Welser, on assignment from IBM Corporation, is director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), a subsidiary of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The goal of NRI, which supports university-based research on future nanoelectronics, is the development of logic devices capable of scaling beyond the limits of the CMOS transistor in the 2020 time frame. Dr. Welser joined IBM Research Division after receiving his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1995. At IBM, he worked on a variety of novel devices, including nanocrystal and quantum dot memories, vertical-FET DRAM, and silicon-based optical detectors; eventually he took over management of the Novel Silicon Device Group. At the time, he was also an adjunct professor at Columbia University. In 2000, he moved to IBM Technology group headquarters, and in 2001, he joined the Microelectronics Division as project manager for the high-performance CMOS device-design groups. In late 2003, he became director of Next-Generation Technology Components, and in 2006, he took on his current role at NRI. He is now based at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

Nikolai Zhitenev is a project leader at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. He received an M.Sc. in physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a Ph.D. in condensed-matter physics from the Russian Institute of Solid State Physics in 1991. He has worked at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at Bell Labs. His research focus is on electronic properties of novel materials in nanoscale devices.