Sammakia, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, is the founding director of the Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center, a New York State Center of Excellence. Editor of the ASME Journal of Electronic Packaging, he holds 19 U.S. patents and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed technical papers. He is also a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and holds a joint appointment in Binghamton’s department of systems science and industrial engineering.

“I am both delighted and humbled to receive this honor from the IEEE,” Sammakia said. “My research has always been motivated by my desire to have an impact on society, to create technology that really makes people’s lives better. This recognition is a sign that I am indeed contributing vital new knowledge to my field.

“It’s also an important validation of the investments Binghamton University has made in small-scale systems research,” he added. “I wouldn’t be able to do the work that I do now without the students, colleagues and facilities that we have here at Binghamton.”

Sammakia, a former IBM senior technical staff member, joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1998. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Alexandria in Egypt and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University at Buffalo.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. The IEEE, which has 400,000 members in 160 countries, publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields. It has developed more than 900 active industry standards.

Fellow is the highest grade of membership conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors and is recognized by the technical community as an important career achievement.

The event, organized by the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing, brings together researchers from academia, national labs and industry for discussions of recent advances in the fields of flexible electronics, device and conductor printing and emerging electronic materials. Participants also discuss research and development needs in the field.

John Pellegrino, director of the Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, gave the symposium’s keynote address. Speakers also included scientists from Penn State, 3M, Corning, Eastman Kodak, GE, HP, PARC and Xerox.

The symposium featured a student poster session as well as tours of CAMM’s roll-to-roll manufacturing research center at Endicott Interconnect Technologies.

CAMM’s latest addition, the CHA Industries Web Coater, was featured during tours of the facility. The $6 million machine, built for the FlexTech Alliance with funding from the Army Research Laboratory, was installed at the CAMM earlier this year.

CAMM Director Peter Borgesen said the web coater allows the center to engage in high-volume manufacturing of thin-film transistors on flexible surfaces. The tool is unique in the country at the moment, and may even be the only one of its kind in the world.

“We can do vacuum processing on a scale that’s not normally done in manufacturing yet, and we can do it with an accuracy that’s not generally possible yet,” Borgesen said. “It enables you to do something that normally you could only do in a physics lab.”

Sammakia, who also served as interim vice president for research in 2003-04, will continue to devote a portion of his time to directing S3IP while the University conducts a national search to replace Gerald Sonnenfeld, who is leaving to become vice president for research at Clemson University.

“Bahgat Sammakia’s experience and knowledge as a researcher, mentor and leader encompass all of the qualities we need to keep strengthening our vital research programs,” said C. Peter Magrath, interim president. “He is one of our many creative stars and it’s a big win for BU that he is again taking on this leadership role.”

Sammakia earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Alexandria in Egypt, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from the University at Buffalo. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

After joining IBM in 1984 as an engineer in the thermal management area, Sammakia held managerial positions in the thermal management department, thermal and mechanical analysis groups, surface science group, chemical lab and the site technical assurance group. His last position before leaving IBM in 1998 was senior technical staff member and manager of research and development for organic packaging in the IBM Microelectronics division.

Sammakia became director of Binghamton’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center in 1998, and he is the founding director of S3IP, a New York State Center of Excellence, which was established in 2003. He holds 14 U.S. patents and 12 IBM technical disclosures and has published more than 150 technical papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. Sammakia, who has contributed to three books on heat transfer and thermal management of electronic systems, is also a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Last month, Sammakia was selected to receive the 2010 ITherm Achievement Award for his contributions to electronics, thermal and thermomechanical research and his service to the electronics thermal management community.

Sammakia was selected to receive the 2010 ITherm Achievement Award in honor of his contributions to electronics, thermal and thermomechanical research, as well as his service to the electronics thermal management community.

Sammakia, director of the Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center (S³IP), a New York State Center of Excellence, also serves as the University’s executive director for economic development. A professor of mechanical engineering, Sammakia spearheads an effort that promises to revolutionize the electronics industry. S³IP is leading the way to advances in flexible electronics as well as more environmentally friendly data centers and manufacturing processes. The center, which includes more than 45 affiliated faculty and staff, has generated more than $700 million in economic impact to New York State industry since 1996.

Sammakia, a Vestal resident and longtime IBM engineer, joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1998. He holds 14 U.S. patents and has published more than 150 technical papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings.

The ITherm Achievement Award was presented June 3 during the 12th Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems in Las Vegas. The award, first given in 1996, is presented biennially. Sammakia is the eighth recipient.

“A device such as this can be used by soldiers in the field, in disaster relief and in the hospital setting for treating wounds that take months or years to heal,” Farnam said. “Limbs that may otherwise become infected and have to be removed can be saved, and lives can be saved.”

Farnam’s research is funded by a fellowship called the IGERT, or Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship. The National Science Foundation awarded $2.5 million to Binghamton University, Cornell University and Albany’s Wadsworth Center. From 2007 to 2012, Binghamton’s $500,000 portion of the award supports student research focusing on the medical applications of flexible electronics.

Mary Beth Curtin, associate director of the Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center (S3IP), said this the first time Binghamton has received an IGERT award. “There’s a lot of promise in flexible electronics — it’s a brand-new field,” she said. “That’s one reason why this award is so exciting for our students.”

The project at Binghamton is led by professors Bahgat Sammakia and Omowunmi Sadik, each of whom nominates graduate students to be funded by the IGERT. For the students, that means a $30,000 yearly stipend in addition to tuition coverage, an expenses-paid study-abroad experience and funding for research materials.

IGERT fellow Nian Du’s work is spurred by rising concerns over the environmental impact of silver nanoparticles — microscopic bits of metal used in a variety of medical applications as well as consumer products. Once touted as wonderful applications of modern technology, nanoparticles’ potential to enter the water supply and penetrate human tissue now worry scientists. If they do turn out to be harmful, Du plans to be ready with a substance that can detect and filter nanoparticles.

Leo Zheng, Binghamton’s newest IGERT fellow, is working with Farnam on the mechanics of the smart bandage. He will design a flexible sensor that can be used to detect undesirable bacteria in places such as public water supply piping.

Although Farnam, Du and Zheng work independently on their research, they certainly aren’t working alone. Along with the IGERT fellows from Cornell and the Wadsworth Center, they take a myriad of classes, from analytical chemistry and biology to materials science and marketing. As a key aspect of the program, fellows from disciplines as diverse as chemistry, biophysics, mechanical engineering and neuroscience gather for seminars and webinars to discuss their research and exchange ideas.

James Turner, research scientist at S3IP and co-writer of the IGERT application, explained that such multidisciplinary collaborations “open up a wealth of possibilities, by bringing together multiple science and engineering approaches to solve a problem in a unique way that maybe wouldn’t otherwise be possible.”

The program’s interdisciplinary nature makes her current research more effective, Du said. “I will have a broader background than others when I graduate,” she added, “and this will give me more preparation for all kinds of jobs.”

IGERT fellows are also learning to collaborate on a global scale through international internships. As part of the IGERT, Farnam is working in Sydney, Australia, with a researcher who specializes in making coatings that prevent microbial buildup on items such as medical implants and contact lenses. “This way I can learn a lot about the biological side of my research, since I specialize in the mechanics,” he said. “In addition, I get to experience how things are done in a different educational system and by a research group in a different field than mine.”

Turner said this global view is a real advantage. “To have students with the experience to interact with people from different cultures, who may have different priorities and perspectives on the world and the role of science in that world, is extremely important,” he said, “and will be more so in the future.”

The IGERT has lead to research collaborations with several departments at Cornell, Curtin said, and this has improved overall research quality. She said that the world of science is seeing a trend toward multi-institutional and multidisciplinary collaboration. “That’s a good thing,” she added, “because it has helped Binghamton to develop partnerships across the nation, which infuse our area with new and different viewpoints.”

That’s the promise of research conducted by Binghamton colleagues Kanad Ghose, a professor of computer science, and Bahgat Sammakia, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the University’s New York State Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Packaging and Integration, or S3IP.

“The amount of energy we spend on running our data centers in the U.S. is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure,” Ghose said. “That doesn’t sound like a big number, but it’s enough to power a couple of good-sized cities for most of the year.”

The statistics are “sobering,” Ghose said. The number of data centers is growing rapidly because of increasing demand for online services for everything from medical records to shopping.

“The unfortunate fact is there’s a lot of waste in this,” Ghose said. “All data centers are ‘overprovisioned.’ They’re designed to handle the peak loads. And most of the time, they operate at 40 to 60 percent of that. When data centers run at a lower than peak load, the energy efficiency is very poor.”

There are also inherent inefficiencies, in part because most servers run on the Linux operating system, which doesn’t have good power management solutions for servers.

That’s just the bad news from the information technology side. Then there’s the cooling.

“The cooling solutions are also overprovisioned,” Ghose said. “Data centers run hot because a lot of machines are packed into a small space. The loads in a data center fluctuate, and you cannot track that changing load fast enough in a cooling system, so you end up playing it safe. There’s an enormous amount of waste.”

Most of the facilities use chilled water, and it takes some time to lower or raise the temperature of the water by 5 degrees. New York state alone spends close to $600 million on utility costs for running its data centers. Half goes to power the computers; the other half is spent on cooling. And utility costs continue to rise.

Most researchers focus on smart workload management when they talk about “green” data centers, but Ghose and Sammakia say that’s not enough. They’re looking for a comprehensive solution. That will mean finding a way to spread the workload across all the machines, planning in advance for the workload allocation and the cooling budget. Ultimately, it means exercising cooling activities and workload activities synergistically.

Just-in-time provisioning of IT resources and just-in-time cooling are the keys here, said Ghose, who expects to set up an experimental data center with Sammakia and other collaborators soon. Companies such as Emerson Network Power and IBM have already expressed interest in the project.

Sammakia, who’s also the University’s executive director of economic development, said the test facility will give a boost to companies in the region and beyond. “Over the next five years, this will help us create hundreds of local jobs and attract companies to the area,” he said. “It will allow New York state and national companies to showcase their energy-efficiency projects.

“It’s a test facility, but at the same time it’s a real, operational data center. Each company will come in with its latest and greatest equipment.”

Ghose said an innovation that results in an energy reduction of, say, 15 percent could make a big splash. He believes their solution could result in savings of more than 25 percent. And the lessons drawn from data centers could pay off for desktop computers as well.

“The writing’s on the wall,” Ghose said. “Unless we address this now, things will become worse. Most server vendors are trying to pack more into the same space and making the problem worse. What makes it worse is the amount of heat you produce in one cubic foot of space. That’s going up significantly because things are becoming smaller and faster. And of course there’s a carbon footprint, the more energy you spend.”