R. Stanley Williams is Principal Laboratory Scientist and Director
of the Quantum Structures Research Initiative (QSRI), the basic research
department in physical sciences at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo
Alto, California. The QSRI was founded in July 1995 to prepare HP
for the major challenges and opportunities ahead in device technology as
features continue to shrink to the nanometer size scale, where quantum
mechanics becomes important.
Dr. Williams attended Rice University from 1970-74, where he obtained his B. A. degree in Chemical Physics. He attended the University of California Berkeley from 1974-1978, where he obtained his M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physical Chemistry. From 1978-80, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He moved to the University of California Los Angeles as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1986. He has received awards for scientific and academic achievement, including the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award and the Sloan Foundation Fellowship. He has been a consultant to several corporations and law firms, as well as an inaugural member of the Defense Science Study Group, an advisor to the Defense Science Board, and an advisor to the Frontier Research Program at the Institute for Physics and Chemistry Research (RIKEN) in Japan. He moved to HP in 1995 as the founding director of the QSRI.
Dr. Williams’ current research interests are in the areas where solid
state chemistry and physics overlap with information technology. He started
his career as a surface scientist, and contributed to the development of
research tools for understanding the physics and chemistry of solid surfaces,
such as photoelectron spectroscopy, ion scattering spectroscopy, and scanning
tunneling microscopy. He is also one of the early contributors to the chemistry
of
opto-electronic materials, which involves the synthesis of new materials
with desirable optical and/or electronic properties and the fabrication
of these materials into useful structures. His most recent research has
been in the areas of the production, characterization and processing of
nanostructures. These are such small solid materials that their size and
shape are as important as composition in determining their properties because
of quantum confinement effects.