Cliff Knollenberg

Cliff is a process engineer with over 25 years of experience making things you can’t see with the naked eye.  He originally studied Mechanical and Materials Engineering next to a dairy farm, and then avoided a life in the steel mines by continuing his studies at a college his high school history teacher referred to as “a cheap diploma mill north of Oakland”.   While he was supposed to be studying Material Science, he actually spent most of his time in a cleanroom learning MEMS fabrication. After his master’s put these skills to work with a startup designing and fabricating optical MEMS. From there he stumbled into the fabrication of AlInGaN semiconductor emitters (again with the optical applications) at a PARC formerly known as Xerox. To shorten his commute, he joined Stanford where he tries to train and steer grad students on and to equipment that will not extend their research projects beyond the lifespan and budget of their funding grants.  In his spare time, he enjoys selecting fabrication equipment that will not break every other day, not require programing in a lost dialect of Unix, and yet perform the tasks needed by grad students for their thesis projects (without ever really understanding what their thesis is really about). If you send him an email that requires thought you may be waiting a while for a response, but in-person inquiries are usually met with sarcasm and a semi-informative response.