Supriyo Datta
Supriyo Datta (born 1954) is an Indian born American researcher and author. A leading figure in the modeling and understanding of nano-scale electronic conduction, he has been called "one of the most original thinkers in the field of nanoscale electronics." As an author, his books are widely used as original research and design work in the field of nanotechnology and electronic devices. Early life and education. Dr. Datta did his schooling from Hindi High School in Kolkata, India. He was first in the whole West Bengal Board of Secondary Education exam in 1970. Datta received his B.Tech  with the President of India gold medal from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India in 1975. He then received both his MS and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977 and 1979 respectively. In 1981, he joined Purdue University, where he is (since 1999) the Thomas Duncan Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering. Career. He started his career in the field of ultrasonics and was selected by the Ultrasonics group as its outstanding young engineer to receive an IEEE Centennial Key to the Future Award and by the ASEE to receive the  Terman Award for his book on Surface Acoustic Wave Devices. Since 1985 he has focused on nanoscale electronic devices and has contributed through his foundational work on (1) quantum transport, (2) spintronics and (3) negative capacitance electronics. (1) Quantum transport: In a series of papers between 1985 and 1995 his group demonstrated how the "non-equilibrium Green's function" (NEGF) formalism used by many-body physicists for uniform conductors could be extended to model electronic devices which are non-uniform and have contacts. He made this work broadly accessible through his book Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Physics, Cambridge (1995), which  is now considered a classic with 10,000+ citations. Between 1995 and 2005 his group combined his earlier NEGF approach with an atomistic Hamiltonian, to establish a conceptual and computational framework that is used by quantum chemists in molecular electronics, and is also the basis for modern quantum transport simulation tools routinely used in the semiconductor industry. He made this work broadly accessible through his book Quantum Transport: Atom to Transistor, Cambridge (2005). Between 2005 and 2015 his group developed approaches for analyzing spin-based devices and circuits that incorporate them. This work along with a new perspective on transport  is described in his book Lessons from Nanoelectronics, World Scientific (2015). (2) Spintronics: In 1990 he proposed, the use of spin-orbit coupling to control electron spin with an electric field rather than a magnetic field. This was experimentally demonstrated in 1997 and is widely used in the field of spintronics. This "proposal planted the idea that spin could be used in its own right as a means to carry and manipulate information — and gave birth to the new field of spintronics.", (3) Negative capacitance electronics: In 2008, along with Sayeef Salahuddin he proposed the concept of negative capacitance devices , which is now considered a prime candidate for reducing dissipation and extending Moore's law. Awards. In 2012 he was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for quantum transport modeling in nanoscale electronic devices. In 2011 he received the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) as well as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has received two IEEE technical field awards: the 2002 IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award , and the 2008 IEEE Leon Kirchmayer Award. He is included in Purdue's Book of  Great Teachers and won the "Herbert Newby McCoy Award" and the "Morrill Award" given by Purdue University. He received the Frederick Emmons Terman Award from the American Society of Engineering Education in 1994, and the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, 1984.