H. Kumar Wickramasinghe
Henry Samueli Endowed Chair
Distinguished Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Biomedical Engineering
| Location: | 3424 Engineering Hall | |
| Email: | hkwick@uci.edu | |
| Phone: | (949) 824-0378 | |
| Address: | The Henry Samueli School of Engineering University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-2575 |
Profile
Wickramasinghe is a respected pioneer in nanotechnology. He invented, developed and spun off the the vibrating probe atomic force microscope and many scanning probe microscopes used world-wide such as the Magnetic Force Microscope, Kelvin Probe Force Microscope, Scanning Thermal Microscope, Photo Induced Force Microscope and the Scattering Scanning Near Field Optical Microscope. Prior to joining UCI, he spent 23 years at IBM Research where he was an IBM Fellow. He held several senior management positions at IBM, the last of which was Senior Manager Nano Science and Technology and CTO Science and Technology at the Almaden Research Center. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and an IBM Fellow. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Institute of Physics and an Honorary Fellow of the Materials Research Society (India). He has received multiple awards, among them the IEEE Morris E. Leeds Award, 1992, the APS Joseph F. Keithley award, 2000, the Distinguished Corporate Inventor Award, National Inventors Hall of Fame, 1998 and the Scientific American 50 award, 2006. He is the author of 192 publications, 110 US patents and 158 invited presentations (including many keynotes).
Education
PhD, University of London, 1974
Research
Wickramasinghe’s research focuses on novel scanning probe microscopes, bio sensors, live cell genomics, point of care diagnostics, and ultra-sensitive measurements in nanoscience. His current work focuses on Photo Induced Force Microscopy (PiFM) – a technique for overlapping an AFM tomography image with a chemical (vibrational) image of the sample on the nanoscale. He is also working on developing and deploying a point of care PCR tester for COVID19 detection.