Compound Semiconductor Week 2025 announces Professor Chris Van de Walle's as The Welker Award recipient

2025 CSW Award Recipients

Prof. Chris G. Van de Walle

University of California, Santa Barbara, USA 

For the development and application of computational methods to elucidate the properties of interfaces, defects, doping, polarization, and loss mechanisms in compound semiconductors

Chris G. Van de Walle is a Distinguished Professor of Materials and the inaugural recipient of the Herbert Kroemer Endowed Chair in Materials Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UCSB in 2004, he was a Principal Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986, and was a postdoc at IBM Yorktown Heights (1986-1988) and a Senior Member of Research Staff at Philips Laboratories in Briarcliff Manor (1988-1991). He has published over 450 research papers and holds 24 patents. Van de Walle is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the APS, AVS, AAAS, MRS, and IEEE, as well as the recipient of a Humboldt Award for Senior US Scientist, the APS David Adler Award, the AVS Medard W. Welch Award, the TMS John Bardeen Award, the MRS Materials Theory Award, and the APS Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics. He is a recipient of a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, and has been recognized as a “Highly Cited Researcher”.

Professor Van de Walle develops and employs first-principles computational techniques to model the structure and behavior of materials. Early in his career he developed a model for predicting heterojunction band offsets, which is still widely used. In the 1990s he started making seminal contributions to the understanding of doping and defects in electronic materials. He challenged the conventional wisdom by showing that impurities rather than native defects were responsible for unintentional doping of wide-bandgap semiconductors such as GaN and ZnO. He subsequently addressed causes of efficiency loss in light emitters by developing accurate methods for calculating Auger-Meitner and Shockley-Read-Hall recombination. He has also been applying these techniques to the understanding and prediction of spin qubits and single-photon emitters for quantum information science. Recently he has also provided new insights into polarization which are benefiting wurtzite- structure ferroelectrics.