Bill Flounders is the Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory. He received his BS in Chemical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 1985 and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. His graduate research was primarily conducted in the U.C. Berkeley Microfabrication Laboratory and focused upon exposed gate field effect transistors for chemical sensor applications. Bill completed post-doctoral research in immunology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture with an emphasis on immobilization, stabilization, and patterning of antibodies on semiconductor substrates. From 1996 to 2001, Bill was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA. Bill’s research program at Sandia developed biosensors for chemical and biological agent detection and custom equipment for wafer-scale biochemical processing.
In 2001, Bill returned to the Berkeley Microlab as the Technology Manager. He provided technical guidance to researchers of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center and was the primary laboratory consultant for design and planning of the next generation of the Berkeley Microlab, the Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory (The NanoLab). The NanoLab opened in 2009, and Bill oversaw the two year transition and start-up of over 150 micro/nanofabrication tools in the new facility. Presently, the Berkeley NanoLab provides research capabilities to over 450 researchers per year representing more than 70 academic principal investigators and more than 25 affiliate member companies, primarily Bay Area technical start-ups.