Physicist
National Institute of Standards and Technology
John Villarrubia is a physicist and project leader in the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Division of the Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He received a B.S. in Physics from Louisiana State University and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University. At Cornell he helped to build the first time-resolved high-resolution electron energy loss spectrometer for measuring surface-molecular vibrational excitations. At IBM as a postdoc, he did early scanning tunneling microscopy work that produced atomic-resolution images of Cl-modified Si surfaces, work published in Physical Review Letters and Science. At NIST he contributed to the Molecular Measuring Machine project, applied mathematical morphological methods to the tip-sample interaction in an STM or AFM to invent the first blind reconstruction method for determination of tip geometry, and developed JMONSEL, a Monte Carlo simulator that uses a suite of physics models for electron-solid interactions to simulate secondary electron image formation for 3-dimensional samples of arbitrary shape. He is the recipient of three Nyyssonen Metrology best paper awards from SPIE, a Nanotech Briefs Nano50 Technology Award, and Dept. of Commerce Silver and Gold medals, and is a fellow of the Washington Academy of Sciences.