The officers and Award Committee of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE) recently announced that the winner of the Roy W. Tess Award in Coatings for 2020 is Qinghuang Lin, Ph.D. For more than 20 years, Lin has reportedly made impactful contributions to the field of advanced photoresist coatings for modern electronics. His seminal contributions are related to polymer coatings, a class of photosensitive polymeric electronic materials called photoresists that are used to “print” modern integrated circuits or microchips.

Lin has spent most of his professional career at IBM, most recently as a senior manager and a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. He received his B.E. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and his doctorate degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin prior to joining IBM. Lin is a fellow of the ACS, the PMSE division, the ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry (POLY), and the International Society for Optical and Photonics Engineering.

Lin’s research interests center on electronic materials for nanofabrication and integration of devices and systems, as well as the applications of these devices and systems in computing, bioelectronics, life sciences, healthcare, etc. Throughout his industrial career at IBM, Lin and his teams focused on solving some of the most important problems in the semiconductor industry—to manufacture ever-smaller, better, cheaper, and more power-efficient microchips for modern electronics. An IBM Master Inventor, Lin holds over 100 granted U.S. patents and has authored/co-authored more than 100 publications. His inventions have been adopted in the mass production of advanced microchips for high-performance supercomputers and some of the most popular electronic devices today.

Lin is a recipient of 28 IBM Invention Plateau Achievement Awards and is a co-recipient of several IBM Research Division Awards. He is a winner of the 2017 Mahboob Khan Outstanding Industry Liaison Award from Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). In 2018, he received the Industrial Polymer Scientist Award from the ACS POLY division for “outstanding industrial innovation and creativity in the application of Polymer Science.” A 248-nm bilayer photoresist technology that Lin co-developed was part of the 40 years of innovations in semiconductor technology that won IBM the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 2004.

A frequent organizer and speaker of scientific conferences at ACS, MRS, SPIE and SEMI, Lin is the editor or co-editor of 19 books or proceedings volumes, as well as three journal special issues. He has given over 75 keynote or invited lectures worldwide.

In addition, Lin has served technical communities for 20 years, including ACS and the PMSE division, lithography community of the semiconductor industry, SRC, and STEM outreach to the general public. Lin has also played leadership roles on setting national research agenda for the semiconductor and other related industries. He recently served as chair of the Technical Advisory Board of the Semiconductor Synthetic Biology (SemiSynBio) program at SRC.

Lin will receive the Tess Award from Eva Harth, Ph.D., chair of the PMSE division, in August 2020 during the 260th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco, Calif. An evening reception in honor of the Tess award recipient and other PMSE and POLY award winners also will be held at the ACS meeting.

For more information, visit www.acs.org.