The 2001 Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Merit Award was presented to Stephen E. Holland of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) on November 6th at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium held in San Diego, California. The citation reads "For pioneering work in the development of high-performance silicon detectors for medical imaging, astronomy, and high-energy physics and the development of new technologies for optical, x-ray, and gamma-ray instrumentation."This annual award honors outstanding technical contributions to the fields of Nuclear and Plasma Sciences. The award includes a plaque, certificate, and a check for $2000.

Stephen E. Holland received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1980, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California-Berkeley in 1983 and 1986. He specializes in silicon detectors and technology. He was a member of the technical staff at Hewlett Packard in Corvallis, Oregon from early 1980 until beginning graduate school in the fall of 1981. He spent one summer during graduate school at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Upon graduation from Berkeley he was a visiting lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at the University of California-Berkeley during the 1986-1987 academic year. He has been with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since October 1987, and was promoted to Senior Staff in 1999. He is affiliated with the LBNL Microsystems Laboratory, a silicon fabrication facility specializing in silicon detector fabrication.

Dr. Holland's early research interests at LBNL were in silicon detector technologies for high-energy physics applications, in particular the development of detector fabrication processes that were compatible with integrated-circuit technologies. In 1990 he, along with Helmuth Spieler of LBNL, demonstrated one of the first monolithically integrated detectors with preamplifiers fabricated on the same fully-depleted, high-resistivity silicon substrate. During this time he also developed techniques to allow for fabrication of large area strip detectors using conventional step-and-repeat lithography, as well as the demonstration of oxide-nitride-oxide gate dielectrics with improved breakdown voltage for ac-coupled strip detectors.

In 1995 Dr. Holland began work on the development of back-illuminated, fully-depleted silicon detectors for UV, visible, and near-infrared applications. This work was motivated by William Moses of the LBNL Center for Functional Imaging and by the SuperNova Cosmology Project at LBNL under Saul Perlmutter. This effort has led to the development and commercialization of high quantum efficiency, low noise, back-illuminated photodiode arrays for use in nuclear medical imaging as well as the development of high-performance charge- coupled devices (CCDs) with applications in astronomy and astrophysics. Fully-depleted, back-illuminated CCDs developed at LBNL are in use for spectroscopy and imaging at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory as well as for extra solar planet searches at Lick Observatory. By virtue of a relatively thick, fully depleted substrate the CCD achieves high quantum efficiency in the near-IR as well as a simplified technology for back illumination when compared to existing scientific CCDs. The technology has recently been shown to have improved radiation resistance to high-energy protons when compared to conventional devices and is planned to be used as the primary imager in the proposed SuperNova/Acceleration Probe satellite.

Dr. Holland is the author or coauthor of over 30 scientific papers and holds 2 patents. He is a member of the IEEE and the American Physical Society.

Dr. Holland can be reached at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Mailstop 50B-6208, Berkeley, CA 94720; Phone +1 510 486-5069; Fax 1+ 510 486-5401; E-mail seholland@lbl.gov.