Dr. Michael A. Huff is Founder and Director of the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange in Reston, Virginia. The MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange was established as a national-level program to provide access to MEMS implementation resources as well as to develop manufacturing techniques to help advance the technology. The MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange continues to grow at a rapid rate and currently has over 40 foundries participating in the network and serves over 3400 customers from over 400 organizations around the country. Dr. Huff has held a variety of notable positions, from industry to academia, working to advance and mature MEMS and Nanotechnology for commercial applications.

Prior to establishing the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange, Dr. Huff was on the faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio. At CWRU his research was focused on developing MEMS microfluidic components for healthcare and defense applications, including a novel MEMS-based insulin pump, which received national attention. Before joining the faculty at CWRU, Dr. Huff held the position of Technical Fellow at the Baxter Healthcare Corporation in Chicago, Illinois and directed Baxter's corporate-wide efforts in applying MEMS technology to novel medical devices, which resulted in several new products. At Baxter, he was also very active in managing product development in more mature technology domains such as infusion pumps, blood warmers, etc., as well as conducting technical due diligence on potential acquisitions.

Dr. Huff has actively participated in MEMS research and development for nearly twenty years and has published numerous papers on MEMS devices and fabrication technologies. Dr. Huff holds several patents for MEMS devices, and has several others pending. His principal technological accomplishments in the MEMS technology domain include: the development of shape-memory materials for high force and large displacement actuators; the development of many novel microfluidic devices and systems; the development of shape-memory alloy as an extremely high-gauge factor strain sensing material; the advancement of silicon wafer bonding as a MEMS fabrication technology; the development of silicon wafer bonding as a technique for MEMS packaging; the development of a thick polysilicon surface micromachined process for higher force or higher capacitive sense applications; the development of a Bond and Etch Back Silicon-On-Insulator (BESOI) process; the demonstration and determination of compressive stress levels in Boron etch stop layers; the development and demonstration of thermal micromachined devices having one of the broadest thermal bandwidths ever reported; commercialization of several MEMS microfluidic devices; the development of MEMS on LTCC for microwave and RF applications; the demonstration of distributed fabrication of MEMS as a viable method to implement high-quality devices; and many others.

Dr. Huff received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering with Highest Honors from Georgia Institute of Technology. He spent several years working at the Missile Systems Division of Raytheon Corporation where he designed the front-end signal acquisition system for the Patriot Missile Platform. He was awarded the M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and simultaneously the M.S. in Material Science and Engineering with a specialization in Electronic Materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. His thesis was under the supervision of one of the most notable pioneers of MEMS technology, Prof. Roger Howe, and involved the design and fabrication of a thermally-isolated microstructure for tin-oxide gas sensors. This thesis work was supported by General Motors Research in Warren, Michigan. Dr. Huff was awarded a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. There his thesis was under the supervision of Profs. Schmidt and Senturia. His thesis involved the design and fabrication of a wafer-bonded electrostatically-actuated pressure-balanced microvalve that could operate at very high fluid pressure levels, and was supported by the Robert Bosch Company in Stuttgart, Germany. He also developed a novel threshold pressure switch using wafer bonding that employed mechanical hysteresis in a plastically-deformed thin silicon diaphragm. His thesis pioneered the now commonly used fabrication technique of silicon wafer bonding for MEMS fabrication. Dr. Huff is responsible for overall management of the MEMS Exchange and is actively involved in lending his expertise and knowledge on various MEMS Exchange customer development efforts.