I am the Managing Director of Adhesives Research Pte. Ltd. Singapore (www.adhesivesresearch.com), a US based manufacturer of high-end, niche market, Pressure Sensitive Adhesives (PSA). Our corporate HQ is in Pennsylvania, USA and we have had a presence in USA, Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia for about 40 years. I was an undergraduate from the Faculty of Science (1990-1993) and was in the pioneer batch of students in the Materials Science Programme. One of the foundations of the Singapore industry is advanced materials and polymers and from my personal experience, I would confirm that a degree in Materials Science from NUS is an excellent way to get your career started in this area.

Randall Cha Cher Liang was born on the 13^th of November 1971. He graduated with Upper Honors in Materials Science/Physics from The Faculty of Science at The National University of Singapore in mid-1996. And between the period of 1996 to 2000, he was pursuing his Masters and Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering under Prof. Chor Eng Fong (EE) and Dr. Gong Hao (Mat. Sci), at The Faculty of Electrical Engineering (Microelectronics Division) in the same university. During the earlier part of his post-graduate studies, he was attached to the Research & Development Department of Non-Volatile Memory Devices at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Limited (CHRT), a Singapore-based wafer foundry company, conducting fundamental research on fabricating high quality oxide-nitride-oxide (ONO) interpoly dielectrics for Flash memory devices. He successfully improved the ONO electrical resistance against plasma process-induced damage (P²ID) for 0.7 micron, 0.5 micron and 0.35 micron Flash EEPROM devices with his research discoveries. He has authored 14 international journal/conference papers on improving ONO’s P²ID resistance - one paper was even given a recognition award by CHRT in 1999. He also has great interests in the other areas of silicon semiconductor device technology. Apart from continuing studies on ONO, he is also involved in research works spanning from gate oxide growth, shallow trench isolation, polysilicon gate etching, plasma film deposition, high/low-K dielectrics, high aspect ratio oxide etching, barrier metal deposition, chemical mechanical polishing, tungsten plug corrosion, electromigration at backend interconnects to copper metallization. He currently holds 5 US patents on silicon devices manufacturing, and has more than 25 pending US/Europe/Taiwan patents to date. He is now working as an engineer in Advanced Module Development team in CHRT conducting research focussing on ultra-thin (13Å) gate oxide integrity and polysilicon pillars reduction.  He is also mentoring some Masters students from both National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.  Dr Cha has eight published scientific papers, 10 published conference papers as well as having given invited seminars here and abroad.

Dr Peter Ho, who has been a post-doctoral fellow at the historic Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (U.K.) for some time now, thinks that the Science Research training he received whilst an undergraduate at the Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore, has provided the cornerstone for his pursuit of world-class research.  Peter graduated in Jul 1996 from the Faculty of Science in NUS with 1st Class Honours in Materials Science.  He was appointed Senior Tutor in the Dept of Materials Science in Sep and then shortly after was granted leave to pursue PhD work in semiconducting polymer devices in the world-renowned group of Professor Richard Friend (FRS) at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

Peter has worked on fundamental and applied aspects of the device physics and chemistry of polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) including charge carrier injection and confinement, polymer microstructure–photophysics–carrier transport issues, photonic structural effects and interfacial phenomena, contributing to and drawing on the immense expertise already present in the Cavendish group.  During this time, he demonstrated the world’s first all-polymer microcavity light-emitting diode with current-transporting distributed Bragg reflectors (See Ho et al., “All-polymer optoelectronic devices”, Science 285, 233-236 (1999)), and developed a new approach to control interfacial carrier dynamics that has made possible a generation of unprecedentedly efficient PLEDs (Ho et al., “Molecular-scale interface engineering for polymer light-emitting diodes”, Nature 404, 481 (2000)).  Peter has presented papers at 5 international conferences, published 15 scientific papers and 5 patent applications.  Since 1998, he has been working as a Scientific Consultant at Cambridge Display Technology (UK), a U.S.-funded spin-off company founded by Professor Richard Friend to commercialise PLEDs.  His project is further development of novel robust device architectures.

Peter has been an avid researcher in science since young.  He participated in a number of relevant pioneering programs that came his way, including the Gifted Education Program.