Howard Katz
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Ph.D, UCLA
B.S., MIT

President of MRS, 2004
AAAS Fellow


Howard Katz joins the Department as a Professor after attaining the position of Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories-Lucent Technologies. He earned a Bachelor's degree in chemistry at MIT, and conducted research on the synthesis of the antibiotic bleomycin, under Professor Sidney Hecht. His Ph.D. was obtained under Professor Donald Cram at UCLA, with a thesis based on multistep syntheses of electron-rich receptors and the relationships between receptor structure and guest cation affinity.

Professor Katz then accepted a position as Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories. After an initial project exploring "converse" host-guest chemistry, where anions were bound to multidentate Lewis acidic receptors, he has focused on new organic materials designed using the principles of physical organic chemistry and self-assembly, synthesized with new methods developed specifically for materials-related targets. Semiconductor devices, electro-optic switches, and information storage media with the highest figures of merit then known were produced from the synthesized materials, and the reported results have become the basis for further work in those fields both at Bell Labs and in the wider materials chemistry community. His most recent work has emphasized nontraditional device fabrication, surface chemistry, and multifunctional device design, and has led to ongoing collaborations with multiple outside companies (including one new startup) and a range of universities. His inventions have been incorporated into over thirty patents and recognized by two R&D 100 Awards.

Dr. Katz has also been a mentor and collaborator to several underrepresented minority scientists among two dozen altogether, held several named lectureships at universities, and recently served as Meeting Chair and Board Member for the Materials Research Society. He is the President of MRS for the year 2004, and was recently named an AAAS Fellow. He has co-chaired DARPA-sponsored workshops in the areas of functional polymers, nanostructured materials, biomimetic circuits, and electrotextiles, as well as five other symposia. Outside of science, Howard Katz is an accomplished musician, and was the principal cellist of the South Orange Symphony Orchestra in New Jersey. He is also an avid tennis player.

Professor Katz's research at JHU continues to be centered on new organic, polymeric, and hybrid materials for electronic- and photonic-based technologies. A rich variety of compounds are designed, synthesized, and incorporated into solid films and larger assemblies for utilization in a wide range of devices and components. Device of greatest interest include transistors for switching display pixels, sensors for detection of biologically and medically important vapors, memory elements for adaptive circuits and information storage, fast diode circuit elements and photodetectors, thermoelectric films, waveguides for optical communication and multiplexing, tunable antennas for control of wireless signals, capacitors for energy storage and low-power consumer electronics, and connectors for nanowire devices. By tailoring the molecular designs specifically to the desired performance targets, device responses can result that are not attainable using conventional inorganic solids, and simple, accessible processing techniques can be used. The group activities will include novel synthetic and interfacial chemistry, self-assembly and crystallization, solid state characterization, engineering of the fabrication processes, evaluation of device performance, and integration into higher-order systems.

Facchetti, A.; Mushrush, M.; Katz, H.E.; Marks, T.J. "N-type building blocks for organic electronics: a homologous family of fluorocarbon-substituted thiophene oligomers with high carrier mobility" Adv. Mater., 15, 33-37 2003

Lee, M.; Katz, H.E.; Gill, D.; Erben, C.; Gopalan, P.; McGee, D."Broadband modulation of light using an electro-optic polymer" Science, 298, 1401-1403 2002

Lee, M.; Mitrofanov, O.; Katz, H.E.; Erben, C. "Millimeter-wave dielectric properties of electro optic polymer materials" Appl. Phys. Lett. 81, 1474-1476 2002

Someya, T.; Katz, H.E.; Gelperin, A.; Lovinger, A.J.; Dodabalapur, A. "Vapor sensing with , -dihexylquarterthiophene field-effect transistors: role of grain boundaries" Appl. Phys. Lett., 81, 3079-3081 2002

Crone, B.K.; Dodabalapur, A.; Sarpeshkar, R.; Gelperin, A.; Katz, H.E.; Bao, Z. "Organic oscillator and adaptive amplifiers for chemical vapor sensing" J. Appl. Phys., 91, 10140-10146 2002

Rogers, J.A.; Loo, L.; Katz, H.E.; Dodabalapur, A.; Raju, V.R. "Fabrication of organic semiconductor circuits by lamination" Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 99, 10252-10256 2002

Someya, T.; Dodabalapur, A.; Gelperin, A.; Katz, H.E.; Bao, Z. "Integration and response of organic transistors with microfluidics" Langmuir, 18, 5299-5302 2002

Katz, H.E.; Hong, X.M.; Dodabalapur, A.; Sarpeshkar, R. "Polarizable gate organic field-effect transistors" J. Appl. Phys., 91, 1572-1576 2002

Hong, X.M.; Katz, H.E.; Lovinger, A.J.; Wang; B.-C. "Thiophene-phenylene and thiophene-thiazole oligomeric semiconductors with high field-effect transistor on/off ratios" Chem. Mater., 13, 4686-4691 2001

Crone, B.K.; Dodabalapur. A.; Sarpeshkar, R.; Filas, R.W.; Lin, Y.Y.; Bao, Z.; O'Neill, J.; Li, W.; Katz, H.E. "Design and fabrication of organic complementary circuits: J. Appl. Phys. 89, 5125 5132 2001

Rogers, J.A.; Bao, Z.; Baldwin, K.; Dodabalapur, A.; Crone, B.; Raju, V.R.; Katz, H.E.; Kuck, V.J.; Amundson, K.; Ewing, J.; Drzaic, P. "Toward electronic paper: large area, rubber stamped plastic sheets of electronics and microencapsulated electrophoretic inks" Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 98, 4835-40 2001

Crone, B.: Dodabalapur, A.; Gelperin, A.; Torsi, L.; Katz, H.E.; Lovinger, A.J.; Sarpeshkar, R.; Bao, Z. "Odor sensing and recognition with organic field-effect sensors" Appl. Phys. Lett. 78, 2229-2231 2001

Katz, H.E.; Bao, Z.; Gilat, S.L. "Synthetic chemistry for ultrapure, processable, and high mobility organic semiconductors" (invited review) Acc. Chem. Res. 34, 359-369 2001

Katz, H.E.; Johnson, J.; Lovinger, A.J.; Li, W. "Naphthalenetetracarboxylic diimide-based n-channel transistor semiconductors: structural variation and thiol-enhanced gold contacts" J. Am. Chem Soc. 122, 7787-7792 2000

Crone, B.; Dodabalapur, A.; Lin, Y.-Y.; Filas, R.W.; Bao, Z.; LaDuca, A.; Sarpeshkar, R.; Katz, H.E.; Li, W. "Large-scale complementary integrated circuits based on organic transistors"
Nature 403, 521-523 2000

Katz, H.E.; Lovinger, A.J.; Johnson, J.; Kloc, C.; Siegrist, T.; Li, W.; Lin, Y.-Y.; Dodabalapur, A. "A soluble and air-stable organic semiconductor with high electron mobility" Nature 404, 478-481 2000