Bio:

Dr.Gurtej Sandhu has over 1300 US utility patents in his name, more than the inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison. He is the only South Asian to be listed among 7 of the most prolific inventors on the planet.  One of  his early and celebrated inventions include his achievement in developing a method of coating microchips with titanium without exposing the metal to oxygen, which would otherwise oxidize the chips instantly and ruin them. Although the genius in him initially did not think too much of his invention, most memory-chip makers use his process today. A Senior Fellow and Vice President at Micron Technology, a company worth $20 Billion dollars and one of the largest memory chip suppliers in the world.  At Micron, he has pioneered several process technologies currently used in mainstream semiconductor chip manufacturing. Dr. Sandhu’s expertise lie in the areas of thin film processes and materials, VLSI, and semiconductor device fabrication. His memory chips are used in high tech products such as computing servers, phones, and automobile space widely utilized by Global Tech Giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, Ford to name a few. In 2018, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded Dr. Sandhu the IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award for outstanding contributions to solid-state devices and technology. Not only are his inventions making an impact in the world but he is also giving his time and knowledge to the next generation of aspiring innovators. He is doing so by mentoring both engineering majors and faculty at Boise State University, now having held this role for over 18 years. His philanthropic acts involve him travelling around the world to provide better educational opportunities for underprivileged children.