(Updated instructor's bio from the "SQUID Technology" APS March Meeting course)

Last Updated: September 2009

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Background

Dr. Michael Burns has worked on Solid State Physics and Biotechnology projects for over almost 30 years.  Dr. Burns is the author of 7 issued U.S. patents in semiconductor, superconductor  and biotechnology fields. He has authored more than  57 publications & presentations.  Dr. Burns is also holder of 8 software copyrights for software ranging from Auger Spectroscopy control & collection, to computer network security.

Dr. Burns is a graduate of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) with BS, MS & PhD degrees in Physics.   El Camino Real High School 1974

While working on his Bachelors at UCLA, Dr. Burns worked in the Environmental Test Lab at Hughes Missile Systems Division (HMS) of Hughes Aircraft Company. Dr. Burns was awarded a Hughes Aircraft Company Masters Research Fellowship to work on his Masters at UCLA. During that time, Dr. Burns worked on ion propulsion systems at Hughes Research Labs and infrared detectors at HMS.  HMS merged with Raytheon in 1997.

Dr. Burns' PhD was under Prof. Paul Chaikin and he finished the last year of his PhD work at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia when Paul moved there from UCLA. Dr. Burns underwent post-doctorial studies at Penn as well as at Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts. Dr. Burns graduate work primarily involved studies of superconductivity and metal-insulator transitions in 2-d films. This work involved the fabrication of ultra-thin (1 atom thick and greater) films, and studies of their electronic properties down to ultra-low temperatures. Other work during this time involved studies of organic quasi-one-dimensional layered superconductors (e.g. (TMTSF)₂PF₆) as well as natural and artificial quasi-crystalline systems.

Dr. Burns post-graduate work at Harvard primarily involved studies of impurity conduction in semiconductors under Prof. Bob Westervelt using intense magnetic-fields (H< 20 Tesla) to tune the dopant wave functions to induce metal-insulator transitions in degenerately doped semiconductors at ultra-low temperatures (T>0.004 K), as well as continued collaborations with Chaikin studying flux lattices on quasiperiodic superconducting sub-micron networks. This later work extended the mathematical concept of commensurability, showing it can be applied to ordered yet non-periodic systems.

After his post-doctorial studies, Dr. Burns accepted an assistant professorship in the Physics Department at the University of Florida (UF) in Gainseville. At UF, Dr. Burns continued his studies of impurity conduction in semiconductors as well as his studies of superconductivity in films. In addition, using PIXE (Proton Induce X-ray Emission), Dr. Burns & his students demonstrated refractory metals made viable copper diffusion barriers.  This DARPA funded research was aimed towards exploring whether refractory metal cladding of copper interconnects was a viable route to copper use for interconnects in IC's.  Dr. Burns & his students also built one of the earliest reactive co-evaporation systems for the production of YBa₂Cu₃O_7-d (YBCO) thin films.

At UF, Dr. Burns also started collaborating with biologists on a variety of topics. This work led to a number of publications and patents on plant biology, optics, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) microscopy. These biology collaborations included researchers at UF, Stanford, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, and Harvard.

Also while at UF, in 1990 Dr. Burns became involved in Conductus, Inc., a tiny pre-IPO venture capital funded start-up company in Sunnyvale California created to commercialize the then-new High-Temperature Superconductors (HTS) such as YBCO. Conductus, which went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1993, in December 2002, merged to become part of Superconductor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: SCON).  Dr. Burns left the University of Florida in early 1992 to devote his full attention to Conductus.  Dr. Burns held numerous positions at Conductus including leading the SQUID group and the Process Development group. While at Conductus, he led the team which created the world’s first commercial product using HTS technology, released in 1992, which was recognized with an R&D 100 Award in 1993.  This included setting up and supervising the manufacturing line for the series of instruments Conductus sold during its early years, supervising the development of the SQUID chips, and developing the cryogenic chip packaging for the SQUID chips. He is also lead inventor of the technique for co-integrating active HTS devices and CMOS devices on the same integrated circuit chip.  The technique marries two highly disparate and incompatible technologies to produce unparalleled performance unachievable by either technology alone: superconductor technology with high-speed SOI CMOS technology.

After leaving Conductus in 1995, Dr. Burns went to the California Institute of Technology’s NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena to help develop HTS based Terahertz¹ sensors.  In the projects first year, it shared the Award for Technical Excellence for development of 2.5 THz (2500 GHz) quantum noise limited mixers. Dr. Burns also worked on tunnel junction spectroscopic imaging sensors (where each high-quantum efficiency pixel determines the energy of each photon it collects). Dr. Burns' work at both Conductus and JPL has been recognized with two NASA Certificates of Recognition. While at JPL, Dr. Burns founded ZeaSoft which was a software company which produced, amongst other things, the worlds first internet laptop tracking software, a product called Homing Pigeon. Homing Pigeon was sold under a variety of names by other companies through 2004.²

Dr. Burns left JPL in 1999 to join Revise, Inc. a start-up in Burlington Massachusetts, which made Laser MicroChemical (LMC) tools for MEMS, Circuit Edit and Engineering of high-end microprocessors ( modification of circuits at the prototype "first silicon" stage).³  Dr. Burns lead the New Process Development efforts at Revise, Inc.  Revise was sold to FEI Company in July 2003 (NASDAQ: FEIC) and moved to their facility in Peabody Massachusetts.  Dr. Burns was the LMC Product Manager at FEI, leading the integration of the Revise technology and products at FEI. In mid-2005, Dr. Burns joined the The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (Draper Lab) on the edge of MIT in Cambridge. In late 2005, Dr. Burns left Draper and along with Prof. Charles Hunt and Dr. Scott Blackstone, started looking for VC funding for their company called Advanced Luminescence. Advanced Luminescence had a field-emission lighting technology with the color rendition of incandescent lighting but in a mercury-free way with the electrical efficiency & costing of fluorescent lighting. Also during this time, Dr. Burns kicked his consulting into high gear with consulting clients including Varioscale, Albany Nanotech, & StarCryoelectronics. In September 2006, Dr. Burns joined a small solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) start-up called Lilliputian Systems as "Manager of Electrochemistry Process Development", working on scaling Lilliputian's R&D fuel cell electrode processes to manufacturing, trouble-shooting those processes, and overseeing the pilot production electrode manufacturing.

During his career Dr. Burns has gained extensive experience in Product Management, both commercial & government Project Management, and setting up & managing low volume manufacturing.  He has designed and set up several laboratories in both University & Industrial settings. He has designed and built countless thin film deposition systems, laser systems, cryogenic systems, electrical & magnetic property measurement systems and computer control/acquisition systems. Deposition systems have ranged from several ultra-high vacuum ( 10^-10 torr) molecular beam epitaxy systems, triple e-beam evaporators, pulsed laser deposition systems, and ultra-clean ( 10^-10 Torr base) sputtering systems.  He has designed and built numerous laser systems with functions ranging from chemical-state probing, through high-power ablative deposition of epitaxial ceramics, through position sensing. He has also contributed to the designs of laser microchemical systems at Revise & FEI. Dr. Burns has designed and built (or re-build) a half dozen He⁴, He³ and He³-He⁴ refrigeration systems, the latter capable of milliKelvin temperatures

Present

Dr. Burns is the Director of Research & Development for Solasta, a solar cell startup with a novel nano-architecture invented at Boston College by Professors Naughton, Kempa and Ren. In addition, he is a Visiting Scholar in the Physics Department of Boston College.

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1}   1 Terahertz = 1000 GHz = 1 Million MHz. = 1 Million Million Hz. = 10¹² Hz.
² e.g. A rebadged version of Homing Pigeon was widely distributed in Canada by Dumoulin-Audiotronic as "Blue Bite, by Blue Expertise, Inc."
³ Laser MicroChemical (LMC) etching is also often called Laser Chemical Etching, or LCE. The Revise machines performed both LMC etching and LMC Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD).