Distinguished Alumnus Prof. Yue Kuo Elected ECS President for 2018-2019

Prof. Yue Kuo (郭育), NTU’s distinguished alumnus and Dow Professor of Texas A&M University, was elected President of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) for 2018-2019, becoming ECS’s first ethnic Chinese president since its establishment 116 years ago.

The mission of ECS is to facilitate the frontier theories and implementation of electrochemistry, solid-state sciences, and other related fields. Currently, ECS has approximately 10,000 individual members and over 100 corporate and laboratory members from more than 80 countries across the world.

Prior to joining Texas A&M University and establishing the famous Thin Film Nano & Microelectronics Research Laboratory in 1998, Prof. Kuo had devoted himself to technological development in industry, and primarily in such organizations as IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center and Data General Semiconductor Division, for nearly two decades.

A pioneer of nano and microelectronics, Prof. Kuo has made world record-breaking achievements and technological breakthroughs in various fields, including integrated circuits, panel displays, solid-state incandescent light-emitting devices, non-volatile memory, plasma technology, and thin-film fabrication, that have exerted tremendous impact on academia and industry. Prof. Kuo’s works on thin-film transistors have become classical textbooks widely used by universities and enterprises worldwide. He is also a recognized technological leader, serving as board members and advisors across the world for a variety of academic societies (e.g., ECS), U.S.-based national academies, universities, companies, and government departments.

The honors Prof. Kuo has received include the Gordon E. Moore Medal, ECS Fellowship, IEEE Fellowship, AVS Fellowship, ECS Electronics and Photonics Award, IMB’s R&D awards, Texas A&M University’s Excellent Innovation Award, Honorary Chair Professor of the National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), and Honorary Visiting Professor at Xi’An Jiaotong University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Nankai University, as well as a large number of best paper awards and hundreds of speech invitations.

Many of ECS’s founding members are prominent scientists and engineers, including: E. G. Acheson, chemist who first commercialized artificial graphite; H. H. Dow, founder of the Dow Chemical Company—the largest chemical company in the U.S.; C. M. Hall, inventor of the Hall–Héroult process—the major industrial process for smelting aluminum; Edward Weston, inventor of the Weston cell that has become a voltage standard worldwide; Thomas A. Edison, 28-year member of ECS since 1903; Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation who joined ECS in 1957. Moore first proposed the Moore’s law in 1965, describing and predicting that the number of transistors and electric resistances per integrated circuit would double every year (later revised to a doubling every 18 months).

Nobel Prize laureates can also be found among ECS members and authors of ECS publications, including Isamu Akasaki (physics, 2014), Rudolph A. Marcus (chemistry, 1992), Hiroshi Amano (physics, 2014), Shuji Nakamura (physics, 2014), Richard Smalley (chemistry, 1996), and Jack Kilby (physics, 2000).