TI failure analysis leader named president of ASM

Dr. Lawrence C. Wagner, failure analysis technical strategy manager and distinguished member of technical staff at Texas Instruments Inc., has been elected president of ASM International, The Materials Information Society.

Dr. Wagner earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Marquette University and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Purdue University. After two years in the High Temperature Chemistry Group at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined Texas Instruments as a failure analysis engineer in 1976. He managed the failure analysis lab for 15 years, starting in 1979.

Wagner has published extensively, including the book Failure Analysis of ICs: Tools and Techniques. He has delivered six tutorials on failure analysis, including tutorials at the International Reliability Physics Symposium, International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits, and the Materials Research Society. He is a member of the Product Engineering Council at Texas Instruments and the Sematech Product Analysis Forum and represents Texas Instruments on the Sematech Quality Council.

He was the first president of the Electronic Device Failure Analysis Society (EDFAS), an Affiliate Society of ASM International, and the first editor of Electronic Device Failure Analysis News. He was also the 1995 general chair of the International Symposium for Testing and Failure Analysis (ISTFA). He chaired the Sematech Product Analysis Forum in 2000.

Wagner joined ASM in 1987 and is also a member of IEEE, ACS, Sigma Chi, and ASMS.

He will serve as ASM president until he is succeeded next October by current ASM vice president Dr. Dianne Chong, director of strategic operations and business-engineering, Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) at the Boeing Company in Bellevue, Wash.

In other ASM news ...

Dr. Daniel P. Dennies of Boeing, Dr. Subhash Mahajan of Arizona State University and Dr. Mark F. Smith of Sandia National Laboratories have been elected to the board of trustees of ASM International.

Dennies is associate technical fellow for The Boeing Company in Huntington Beach, Calif. He has 24 years of experience as a metallurgist and in performing failure investigations. The majority of his career has been in the aerospace industry working on projects such as the Space Shuttle Main Engine, the National Launch System, the National Aerospace Plane, expendable launch systems like Delta and Titan, and most recently the International Space Station. He also has experience in the forging and raw material industries.

He received a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; a master’s degree in materials engineering from University of Southern California; an MBA from Pepperdine University; and a Ph.D. in material science and engineering from University of California-Davis.

Mahajan is professor and chairman for the department of Chemical and Material Engineering, Fulton School of Engineering, Arizona State University. He obtained his undergraduate education in India and then studied at University of California at Berkeley, where he completed his Ph.D. He subsequently held positions at University of Denver; Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, England; AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J.; and Carnegie Mellon University. He was also visiting professor at the University of Antwerp and the Ecole Central de Lyon. He joined Arizona State University in 1997.

His research focuses on structure-property relationships in functional materials and deformation behavior of solids.

Smith is deputy director of the Advanced Manufacturing Process Science and Technology Center at Sandia National Laboratories - a 300-person center that annually conducts nearly $60 million of R&D to support various national security programs. He joined Sandia in 1981. Since 1993, he has also served as an adjunct professor in the Department of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering at New Mexico Tech University.

Before moving into technical management at Sandia in 1999, Smith was best known for his pioneering work in thermal spray technology. He was recently inducted into the Thermal Spray Hall of Fame, founded by the ASM Thermal Spray Society (TSS).

He received his graduate and undergraduate degrees at Iowa State University. His father, John F. (Jack) Smith, is a retired professor of metallurgy and former department chair at Iowa State, who remains active with ASM as editor of Journal of Phase Equilibria and Diffusion. Both father and son are fellows of ASM.

ASM International, The Materials Information Society, serves the materials science and engineering profession. ASM's worldwide membership is comprised of 38,000 research scientists, materials engineers, faculty members, industrial and manufacturing engineers, technicians and students whose work involves advanced materials, processes that improve performance and applications that improve our quality of life. Visit www.asminternational.org for more information.