Purpose
The Bill Sproul Award and Honorary ICMCTF lectureship is to recognize the achievements of a mid-career researcher who has made outstanding scientific and/or technological contributions in areas of interest to the Advanced Surface Engineering Division (ASED) of the AVS, with an emphasis in the fields of surface engineering, thin films, and related topics.
Biography
Jiri Houska is a Professor of Applied Physics at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (Czech Republic). He received his Ph.D. degree in 2007 under the supervision of Jaroslav Vlcek and Marcela Bilek, and spent extended periods at the University of Sydney (Australia), Polytechnique Montreal (Canada) and RWTH Aachen University (Germany). His main research interests include solid-state physics and physics of thin films, preparation of thin-film materials by magnetron sputtering and ab initio calculations of their structures and properties (e.g., detailed investigation of the system Si‑B-C-N), modelling of the atom-by-atom growth of thin-film materials by classical molecular dynamics (e.g., TiO2, ZrO2, Al2O3, ZnOx, Cu-Zr, Cu-Zr-Al or Ti-Al-N), design of multilayered coatings (e.g., thermochromic multilayers ZrO2/V1‑xWxO2/ZrO2), characterization of thin films (in the first place optical properties by spectroscopic ellipsometry), methodology of simulations at various scales and new ways how to support the experiment by them. Jiri Houska has published 105 papers in refereed journals, including 54 as the first and corresponding author or senior author, and presented 14 plenary, invited or keynote conference lectures. He has been involved in the organization of several international conferences (symposia at ICMCTF, symposium at EMRS, PSE). In 2018 his research has been acknowledged by the Award of the President of the Czech Science Foundation (project of the year in the field of technical sciences).