1. Home
  2. News & Events
  3. Latest News
  4. Jim Speck Receives 2024 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship

Jim Speck Receives 2024 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship

Image: UCSB

Jim Speck, a materials science professor at UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded the 2024 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF), a prestigious Department of Defense program supporting innovative and fundamental research. The fellowship provides up to $3 million in funding over five years and is regarded as the DoD’s flagship award for single-investigator research. Speck is one of 11 recipients selected from an initial pool of 170 applicants.

PDI holds a strong connection to Speck, who served on its Scientific Advisory Board from 2013 to 2018, and whose expertise and guidance greatly impacted PDI's research and strategic focus.

Speck’s research proposal, Beyond the Band Minima: High Energy Electron Dispersion, Physics, and Technology, continues his long-term investigations into gallium-nitride (GaN) semiconductors and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). His work on electro-emission spectroscopy (EES) has enabled direct measurements of "hot" electrons, offering new insights into non-radiative processes that affect LED efficiency. With the VBFF support, Speck aims to develop techniques to study conduction-band structures and high-energy electron transport, addressing challenges in semiconductors and related technologies.

Speck is a long-time collaborator of computational theoretician Chris van de Walle, who served as a member of PDI's Scientific Advisory Board from 2001 to 2009, and was recently awarded the Rahman Prize for Computational Physics.

Source: UC Santa Barbara