Awardee Interviews | Biography: John W. Coburn
John W. Coburn
John W. Coburn is currently a part-time Senior Research Associate in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley collaborating with Professor David Graves. John was a Research Staff Member and Manager at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose for 25 years until his retirement in 1993. Immediately following his retirement, he spent a year at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics in Freiburg, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist. His scientific interests are in the area of plasma processing, in particular plasma etching and reactive ion etching, and he has been teaching an AVS short course on this topic since 1980. In 1991, he was awarded Honorary Membership in AVS, and in 1993 he shared the John A. Thornton Memorial Award with his long-time colleague at IBM, Dr. Harold Winters. John served as AVS President in 1988 and as Chair of the Scholarships and Awards Committee from 1996-1997. He was the Treasurer of both the AVS Northern California Chapter (NCCAVS) and AVS National.