418 Phillips Hall
Phone: 607-255-6271
Fax: 607-255-4742
E-mail: spencer@ece.cornell.edu
Dr. Michael Spencer, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Cornell University was born in Detroit Michigan and raised in Washington DC. Recent work has emphasized wide bandgap materials and Dr. Spencer group was the first to produce conducting AlN and thick films of beta SiC grown by the bulk sublimation technique. Dr. Michael G. Spencer, a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award for 1985, the Alan Berman Research Publication Award from the Naval Research Laboratories in 1986 (for research leading to the first identification of a self interstitial defect in AlGaAs), the White House Initiative Faculty Award for Excellence in 1988, a Distinguished Visiting Scientist appointment at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in 1989 and a 1992 recipient of a NASA Certificate of Recognition, received his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering and his Ph.D.. in Electro-Physics from Cornell University in 1981. Dr. Spencer's experience includes two years at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he supervised and, managed the design, prototype production and manufacture of two different product lines of power rectifiers. Dr. Spencer has served as a research scientist and/or consultant to General Electric, The Naval Research Laboratories, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and (NASA) National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Spencer has authored over 50 publications in the area of compound semiconductor research. He has also presented numerous scientific papers. Dr. Spencer is on the permanent committee for the Electronic Materials Conference, the Compound Semiconductor Conference, as well as helped initiate and form the International Conference on Silicon Carbide and Related Materials. Dr. Spencer is currently one of the Directors of the NSF sponsored National Nano-fabrication network (NNUN). He currently has co-authored three U.S. patents with several patents pending.
Dr. Spencer has over fourteen years of research experience in the epitaxial and bulk growth of compound semiconductors such as GaAs, SiC and AlN (growth techniques include molecular beam epitaxy, vapor phase epitaxy, liquid phase epitaxy, and sublimation), microwave devices, solar cells and electronic materials characterization techniques (including deep level transient spectroscopy and photoluminescence). His particular interest has been in the correlation of device performance with material growth and processing parameters.