Vivek Kapila earned a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. Most recently, he worked on an NSF funded research project titled, "Integration of Wear-resistant and anti-stiction Coatings Deposited from Waterborne Chemistries into Micro-electromechanical System Fabrication Process". The overall objective of this research was the development and characterization of duplex wear resistant and anti-stiction coatings onto polysilicon based MEMS structures from an aqueous media. Coarse-grained and all atom models were developed to investigate, via molecular dynamics simulations, the evolution of the deposited film structures under the conditions of sliding friction. MD simulations have been used to gain a fundamental understanding of the physics and chemistry of the system under sliding friction at the scales inaccessible by experiments.

Earlier, he worked on another NSF funded project titled “Waterborne Self-Assembled Monolayer Films for Stiction Reduction in Silicon Based Micro-electromechanical Structures”. The objective of this work was the development and characterization of organic (silane) coatings from aqueous media that meet the requirement of preventing stiction problem in the MEMS based structures. Coarse-grained models were developed and Monte-Carlo simulations were performed in order to gain a molecular level understanding of the structure of silane films on a charged polysilicon substrate. Results from this work have been published in various refereed journal articles and conference proceedings. He has worked on the above two projects under supervision of the project PI’s Prof. Srini Raghavan and Prof. Pierre Deymier in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering.

Vivek has a MS degree in Materials Science and Engineering from South Dakota of School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD, and a BE degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Roorkee (now IIT-R), Roorkee, India. Also, he recently spent 5 months (08/03-12/03) as a staff research assistant at the Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, NM.