Jim Sturm is interim dean


Love of electrical engineering lights his path

James C. Sturm '79 is a scientist. He wasn't all that keen on the idea when he was an undergrad, but over time he came to see that discovery, innovation, and volts and amps are his bread and butter.

Professor Sturm recently was appointed interim dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, additional administrative responsibilities for this man who is also director of the Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials (POEM), and a professor of electrical engineering.

Professor Sturm began his academic career at Princeton, although such a career was not originally in his plans. When his senior year was coming to a close, he was trying to decide between attending one of the business schools he'd been accepted to, or getting a job in the corporate world. At the time, he believed a technical career as an electrical engineer would not have much of an impact on the world.

"One of my last interviews at the end of the day was with some VP at an investment bank in New York in the corner office on the top floor with a nice view," said Professor Sturm. "He picked up my resume and said 'So, you're an electrical engineer. What are you doing here?'"

Volts and amps

Professor Sturm tried to explain his goals and aspirations, but before he got very far, he was thrown for a loop when the VP took the opportunity to satisfy a curiosity, and asked the not-yet-Professor Sturm to explain the difference between volts and amps.

"So, I spent nearly the whole hour explaining volts and amps," he recalled. "On the train back to campus, I realized that was the most fun that I'd had in all of my interviewing, so if that's what I like, then that's what I should do."

At that moment he realized he loved electrical engineering too much to abandon it for a career in business.

Therefore, he began his post-school life with the last thing he expected: a technical job using his electrical engineering education. He began at a small, nascent company, called Intel.

"I had the time of my life working there," Professor Sturm said. "They didn't have gray hair and smoke pipes, and wear white lab coats but wore blue jeans and T-shirts and were doing things that were having great impact."

His work at Intel inspired him to learn more about his field of choice, so he left to pursue a master's degree and eventually a Ph.D. at Stanford University. The road ultimately led back to Princeton, where he has passed onto his students and the young researchers working in his lab his passion for engineering.

"I always tell young people, 'Have some idea of what you want to do, and jump in with both feet," Professor Sturm said. "If it doesn't feel right, find something that does, but always jump in with both feet."

The place where Professor Sturm feels right is here. He believes that Princeton is a petri dish, where discovery can proliferate and flourish. From his positions as interim dean, POEM director, lab head, and professor, he can see certain aspects of the academic world are absolutely essential to innovation.

Free thinking

Industrial laboratories such as the one he worked in at Intel are ultimately driven toward specific goals, and large teams often work jointly with deadlines.

To have truly revolutionary advancements in engineering, Professor Sturm believes that people must exist in an environment in which they think freely and are encouraged to look outside the normal scope of research. The new discoveries made in biotechnology in particular, he said, are the result of engineers and life scientists working outside comfortable parameters.

"The essence of new discoveries is often the individual, and you can't run these projects in a way that will stifle the individual," Professor Sturm said. "There has to be a lot of freedom for individuals to innovate. That's the key point of academia. You can't run it like an industrial laboratory."

Sturm's group research goes in new directions

The School of Engineering and Applied Science has been making treks further into the field of biotechnology recently, and Professor James Sturm's research group is part of the quest.

Professor Sturm's group mainly focuses on research that falls neatly under the heading of "electrical engineering," but more recently the work has been extending beyond that term. Much of the work over the years has stemmed from the theory of Moore's Law: the theory that the smaller something is, the cheaper it is to produce.

"We're taking some of the technical abilities that had been developed for the very small world of integrated circuitry and applying it to other things, such as the world of biology," Professor Sturm said. "The length scales in circuitry and microbiology are similar."

Professor Sturm began working with Professors Robert Austin of physics and Edward Cox of molecular biology and eventually gathered a complete group that has made some significant strides in electrophoresis, a process routinely used in molecular biology labs for identifying pieces of DNA.

"We've developed some methods for very rapidly sorting DNA of different sizes," Professor Sturm said. "We got that process to take seconds, rather than hours."

These innovations could have significance in genetic research and medical applications. Another jaunt into biotechnology is new optic research that defies Moore's Law. New user interface methods for information systems such as display walls or electronically charged clothing require larger human-size products, rather than the usual, smaller microchips. Conventional materials and methods for micro-chips would be too expensive to use on a large scale.

Thus, Professor Sturm's group is developing organic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that can be fabricated over large areas with a special focus on printing methods, such as ink jets.

Professor Sturm has worked in the fields of silicon-based heterojunctions, three-dimensional integration, silicon-on-insulator, optical interconnects, TFT's, and organic light-emitting diodes.

His current research interests include silicon-germanium-carbon and related heterojunctions on silicon, SOI and 3-D integration, large-area and printed electronics, flat-panel displays, organic semiconduct- ors, and the nanotechnology-biology interface.

Professor Sturm has won 10 awards for teaching excellence from Princeton and the Keck Foundation. He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a von Humboldt Fellow at the Institut fuer Halbleitertechnik at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Jim Sturm's research group is applying electrical engineering principles to biological and organic materials .