Spolenak, Ralph

Ralph Spolenak has been promoted to tenured Associate Professor on June 1^st, 2010 after a term as Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) and Chair of the Laboratory for Nanometallurgy starting October 1^st, 2004. He is currently serving as the director for the Materials Research Center (MRC) of ETH Zurich and the chairman of the Electron Microscopy Center (EMEZ) board.

Prof. Spolenak was born August 17, 1971 in Wels, Austria. He studied physics at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. After completing his diploma thesis in the field of solid state physics in 1995, and a brief research term at the University of Pavia, Italy, he moved to Stuttgart, Germany, to commence his PhD work at the Max-Planck-Institute for Metals Research and the University of Stuttgart. In 1999 he completed his dissertation on Alloying effects in electromigration and was subsequently awarded the Max Planck Society's Otto Hahn medal for his achievements during his thesis.

In 1999 Prof. Spolenak was hired as a Postdoctoral Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies in the USA. There he was working on the mechanical properties of thin metal films. During this time he became a member of the principal research team to establish the first dedicated Laue microdiffraction beamline at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. After a year as a visiting scientist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, he returned to the Max-Planck-Institute in 2002 to serve as a group leader in the department of Prof. E. Arzt.

The main research interests of Prof. Spolenak's group are the mechanical properties of metals at the nanoscale and how these properties can be influenced by metallurgical approaches. The combination of testing, characterization and modeling are essential for making significant advances in this field. This comprises the development of new, mostly synchrotron based, in situ testing methods that allow for analysis at the nanoscale. Prof. Spolenak has been organizing several symposia at international conferences and is organizing the work group Interconnect systems for microelectronic devices for the German Society of Materials (DGM).