Safa kasap 

Biography

"Born in 1953, Safa Kasap grew up in London, England, and obtained a BSEE (1976), MSc (1978) and PhD (1983) from the Imperial College of Science and Technology at the University of London, specializing in optoelectronic materials and devices. In July, 1986, Professor Kasap joined the University of Saskatchewan (U of S) as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Two years later he was promoted to associate professor, and in July, 1992 he was made a full professor, which is an externally reviewed appointment. During a sabbatical from the U of S (1997), Professor Kasap was a Visiting Research Scientist with Dr. John Rowlands at the Sunnybrook Hospital at the University of Toronto, where they jointly wrote a number of articles on direct conversion detectors, including the Physics Today feature article that was published in November 1997. In 2002, he was named a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Electronic and Optoelectronic Materials and Devices, a seven-year appointment, which has been renewed in 2009. He is currently also the Director of the Electronic and Photonic Materials and Devices Research Laboratories in the College of Engineering. (There are eight major laboratories.) In addition to two well-known textbooks on electronic materials and devices, and optoelectronics and photonics (with translations in Greek, Korean and Chinese), and numerous chapters in books, handbooks and encyclopedias and reviews, Safa Kasap has published more than two hundred articles in refereed international journals, as well as invited papers in a number of prestigious journals. He has been invited to present his research at numerous international conferences and, to date, has given two plenary presentations. He has participated extensively in committee work both at the U of S and in professional associations and committees outside the university. He has been a member of the editorial boards of well-known engineering journals, and since January 1998, he has been the Reviews Editor and Deputy Editor for J. Materials Science: Materials in Electronics (Springer). In 2002 and 2003 he was the Guest Editor of two prestigious special issues of the IEE Proceedings on Circuits, Devices and Systems, published by the Institution of Electrical Engineers; these issues were entitled “Selected Topics on Electronic Noise,” and “Amorphous and Microcrystalline Semiconductors.” Dr. Kasap has been the Chair of the International Advisory Committee and Chair of the Program Committee of the International Conference on Optical, Optoelectronic and Photonic Materials and Applications, ICOOPMA (Darwin, 2006 and London, 2007, both sponsored by Springer). He was the Conference Chair of ICOOPMA2008, July 2008, held in Edmonton, Canada (http://icoopma2008.usask.ca). He is a member of the program and international advisory committees of the Canadian Semiconductor Technology Conference (CSTC), the International Conference on Photo-Excited Processes and Applications (ICPEPA), The International Symposium on Non-Oxide Glasses (ISNOG) and the International School on Condensed Matter Physics (ISCMP). Recently, Dr. Peter Capper (UK) and Professor Kasap edited a major comprehensive reference work entitled The Springer Handbook of Electronic and Photonic Materials that has 55 chapters and 1400 pages which has been published by Springer (Heidelberg, Germany, 2006). He has just completed writing a new major reference book (with two other authors, Harry Ruda and Yann Boucher) entitled The Cambridge Illustrated Handbook of Optoelectronics and Photonics, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Professor Kasap is currently involved in eight funded research projects supported by grants from NSERC and industry. His most important project is on enhancing the properties x-ray photoconductors for x-ray image detectors, and developing new models for these novel direct conversion detectors. His other projects involve rare-earth (Er) doped glasses for photonics, Sm and Eu doped fluorozirconate glasses as scintillators and phosphors for medical imaging, and excess noise in devices. His pioneering works in the last twenty years on a-Se alloys was responsible for the development of the x-ray photoconductor alloy material used in recently commercialized a-Se direct conversion x-ray image detectors for medical imaging; these detectors have shown to have the highest resolution. His research funds to date total over $11 million. He has supervised 23 MSc and 7 PhD theses and 19 PDFs and numerous research associates to date. Many of his past students and PDFs currently hold key positions in industry and academia. In 2006, he gave the Georgi Nadjakoff Memorial Lecture, which is the most prestigious plenary lecture in the International School on Condensed Matter Physics (14th ISCMP, Varna, September 2006). Among Professor Kasap’s honours and awards received to date is a DSc in Engineering (1996) from the University of London, for his distinct contributions to materials science in electrical engineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Engineering Institute of Canada, the American Physical Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers (now the Institution of Engineering and Technology), the Institute of Materials (IOM3), the Institute of Physics, the Society for Glass Technology, and the Australian Institute of Physics and the SPIE. He was awarded a Fellow of the City and Guilds London Institute (FCGI) in the UK for his outstanding contributions to engineering education; FCGI is only given to a few individuals who have been recognized for their societal contributions, including contributions to education and vocational training"

Research Interest

Electrical and Computer Engineering