John G. Simmons, Ph.D.

simmonsj@mcmaster.ca

Dr. John Simmons (89, Engineering Physics) received a B.Sc., Ph.D. and D. Sc. (higher doctorate) from the University of London. Initially (1959-1964), he worked at Philco and Burroughs Research Laboratories in the USA where he was concerned with tunneling and transport phenomena in solid state devices. From 1964-69, he was Manager of the Solid State Devices Department in the Exploratory Research Division at the Standard Telecommunications Laboratory in the UK and was concerned with solid state display devices and negative resistance and memory devices. During the period 1969-1978, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto where he was involved primarily with silicon-based devices including electrically erasable memory devices, negative resistance and switching devices. From 1978-81, he was Sherman Fairchild Professor of Solid State Electronics at Lehigh University in the USA. There he carried out research on silicon/silicon nitride non-volatile memory devices, novel static memory devices and binary state switching devices. From 1981-89, he was Professor of Microelectronics and Director of the and CADMAT Centre at the University of Bradford in the UK. There he was involved in a variety of III-V compound semiconductor devices, including lasers, detectors and heterojunction bipolar and field effect devices. Since 1989, he has been the BNR-NSERC Industrial Research Professor of Optoelectronics in the Engineering Physics Department at McMaster. His current research involves studies into novel III-V compound semiconductor devices for optoelectronic integrated circuits including digital optical switches, strained layer quantum-well and distributed feed-back lasers, and a variety of heterojunction bipolar and field-effect devices. This work is done in collaboration with BNR and NRC where students also spend periods of time on their research projects.

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