Dr. Ammar Nayfeh was born in Urbana IL in 1979. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 2001 in electrical engineering and his master's degree in 2003 from Stanford University. Dr. Nayfeh earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2006.  His research focused on heteroepitaxy of Germanium on Silicon.  After his PhD, he joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) as a researcher working in collaboration with IBM.  Following that, he then spent a year as a consultant with PDF solutions and later joined a silicon valley start-up, Innovative Silicon (ISi) in 2008. In addition, he was a part time professor at San Jose State University. In June 2010, he joined MIT as a visiting scholar and became a faculty member at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, UAE. At Masdar Institute currently now Khalifa University he is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.   His primary research interests is on new material systems for future more efficient low power semiconductor devices. This included transistors, memory, photovoltaics, and photodetectors.  Professor Ammar Nayfeh has authored or co-authored over 100 publications, and holds three patents. He is a member of IEEE, MRS and Stanford Alumni Association.  He has received the Material Research Society Graduate Student Award, the Robert C. Maclinche Scholarship at UIUC, and Stanford Graduate Fellowship.