Ilesanmi Adesida: Nigerian American Electrical Engineer Makes us Proud

Professor Ilesanmi Adesida, a Nigerian academic, is one of several of the nation’s citizens in the academia who are doing Nigeria proud. 

An Electrical Engineer, Ilesanmi Adesida was born in 1949 in Ifon, Ondo, Nigeria. He is a naturalized American physicist of Yoruba Nigerian descent. Adesida enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley and earned his B.S. degree in 1974; his M.S. degree in 1975; and, his Ph.D. degree in 1979. Adesida was awarded an IBM postdoctoral fellowship from 1979 to 1981. His research interests include nanofabrication processes and ultra-high-speed optoelectronics.

 

Upon graduation, Adesida served as a research associate at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility and School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University from 1979 to 1984. He then returned to Africa and accepted a position as the head of the electrical engineering department at Abubakar Tafawa Belewa University in Bauchi, Nigeria.

 

In 1987, Adesida returned to the United States and worked at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a professor of electrical and computer engineering. In 1994, he was appointed as a research professor for the Coordinated Science Laboratory and as a professor in the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology.

 

 

 

Adesida went on to serve in numerous academic and research capacities at UIUC. He served as the associate director for education for the NSF Engineering Research Center for Compound Semiconductor Microelectronics from 1990 to 1997.

 

In 2000, Adesida became the director of the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory and was appointed as a professor of materials science and engineering. After serving as Dean of the College of Engineering from 2005 to 2012, Adesida was named provost and vice chancellor for Academic Affairs. A mentor as well as a research manager, he guided the education of nineteen post-doctoral fellows, conferred thirty-four Ph.D. degrees upon his students, and supervised numerous undergraduate research projects.

 

In 2016, he was appointed the provost of Nazarbayev University, a school in Kazakhstani, the 9th largest country in the world. According to his profile on the school’s website, he is an accomplished scientist and administrator in both science and the academia.

 

Adesida is also the Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he retired from Illinois in 2016. In May 2012, the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois selected Adesida to be the next vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost of the Urbana campus, a position he held from August 15, 2012 to August 31, 2015.

 

Adesida resigned as provost of Urbana-Champaign, as he was caught up in the same scandal that Chancellor Phyllis Wise resigned for – using private emails for discussing official business during the Steven Salaita controversy. It was alleged that he did this to avoid public records laws.

 

Other positions that Adesida held at Illinois included Dean of the College of Engineering, Director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Director of the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Professor of the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Adesida was also a member of the board of Fluor Corporation from 2007 to 2011.

 Adesida is an expert in the processing of semiconductors and other materials at the nanometer-scale level and in ultra-high-speed heterostructure field-effect transistors—the sort of transistors used in cell-phones, fiber optics communications, deep space communications, and other applications. His contributions have provided insights into the limits of advanced lithography and other nanofabrication techniques.

 

He and his students continue to work in the areas of nanoelectronics and high-speed optoelectronic devices and circuits. Recent work has focused on the development of devices and circuits in the key materials such as indium phosphide and gallium nitride utilized in high-performance wireless, optical fiber communications, and high temperature applications. He has published over 350 referenced papers, has presented over 250 papers at international conferences, and has written many book chapters.

 

Also, Adesida is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Vacuum Society, and the Optical Society of America.

 

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, the Nigerian Academy of Engineering, the Materials Research Society, and the Society for Engineering Education.

 

In 1994, he received the Oakley-Kunde Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education from Illinois, and in 1996 he won the Best Paper Award at the Micro- and Nano-Engineering Conference. In 2011, he was awarded the Electrons Devices Society Distinguished Service Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 2016, he won the Functional Materials John Bardeen Award from The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society.

 

At Illinois he was appointed a University Scholar and an Associate Member of the Center for Advanced Study. He is a former president of the IEEE Electron Device Society, a winner of the EMSA Presidential Student Award; an IEEE Electron Device Society Distinguished Lecturer (1997–2002); a member of the Bohmische Physical Society (1988); and the holder of an IBM Postdoctoral Fellowship (1979–1981).

In 2013 he was selected by the Carnegie Foundation of America as a 2016 Great Immigrant Honoree. Adesida has organized and chaired many international conferences, including the International Symposium on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beams and Nanofabrication; the TMS Electronic Materials Conference; and the Topical Workshop on Heterostructure Microelectronics. He also served as the President of the IEEE Electron Device Society and was named a Distinguished Lecturer from 1997 to 2002.

 In addition, Adesida was a co-founder of Xindium Technologies, and served as a member of the board of Fluor. He has been a member of the National Academies Board of Army Science and Technology since 2009 and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.