Francesca Iacopi is an engineer, researcher and an academic. She specializes in materials and nanoelectronics engineering and is a professor at the University of Technology Sydney. She is a chief investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Transformative Meta-Optical Systems, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia, and a senior member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Iacopi has authored over 130 publications and holds 9 granted patents. Her selected research areas include Nanoelectronics, Semiconductors, 2D Materials, Nanophotonics and Energy Storage. Her research has added to the ITRS roadmap of materials and processes for advanced semiconductor technologies regarding devices, interconnects, and packaging.
Iacopi’s research contributions have earned her various awards including a Gold Award for Graduate Students (Materials Research Society) in 2003 and Global Innovation Award (TechConnect World) in 2014. She has served as an advisory committee member to the Queensland State Government on Science and Innovation in 2015. Iacopi was appointed representative for the IEEE Electron Devices Society to the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS) in 2019. She founded and was the inaugural chair of IEEE Electron Device Society Chapter in New South Wales in 2019. She is an Elected Member of the IEEE Electron Devices Society Board of Governors.
Education
Following her high school degree at the Liceo Scientifico Augusto Righi in Bologna, Iacopi went on to complete her Master’s degree in Physics from La Sapienza University of Rome in 1996 and then moved to Belgium for her doctoral studies. She received her Ph.D. degree in Materials and Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2004, under the supervision of Karen Maex. Later, she also completed a Master’s of Arts in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies from the same university in 2009.
Career
During her M.Sc. studies, Iacopi worked as a junior researcher at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics from 1995 till 1998 and later moved to Belgium with a position at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in collaboration with CERN, Switzerland till 1999. In the following decade, Iacopi joined the Inter-university Microelectronics Center in Leuven, Belgium, as a research scientist and later got promoted to senior scientist from 2006. During her term in IMEC, Iacopi researched on interconnects and nanotechnology. Afterwards, she spent one year in Japan, where she was appointed Guest Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Kashiwa Campus, to study novel plasma processes. In 2010, she moved to USA and accepted an industrial position at Globalfoundries as a Manager of Customer Packaging Technology and directed the Chip-Package Interaction strategy for the company. Subsequently, Iacopi moved to Australia for a research position with Griffith University, where in 2012, she was awarded a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. During this period, she founded her own research group and invented a catalytic process to obtain epitaxial graphene from silicon carbide on silicon. In 2015, she became a member of Advance Queensland Panel of Experts for the Queensland Government. During this time, she served as an advisor to the Queensland Government on the Science and Innovation for the State.
In 2016, Iacopi joined University of Technology Sydney and was appointed as Full Professor. She leads the Integrated Nanosystems Research Lab. In 2017, she served as Head of Discipline, Communications and Electronics for two years; in 2019, she founded and chaired the IEEE Electron Device Society Chapter in New South Wales, along with being appointed as Associate Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET). In 2020, she was appointed as Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems.
Research and work
Iacopi’s notable research areas include Nanoelectronics, Semiconductors, 2D Materials, Nanophotonics and Energy Storage. Iacopi’s earliest research focused on instrumentation for Medical Nuclear Imaging.