Academic Activity of Peter Stallinga University of The Algarve updated: October 2018

Contents

This document is a description of my activity at the university of The Algarve. It was written for the application of Associate Professor in 2011 and includes a CV and the description of scientific and pedagogic work done. The document is written in the HTML format to facilitate the modern techniques of browsing through the document in an electronic fashion and is available online at http://www.stallinga.org/AcadActiv/ and on CD. Where indicated, clicking on the associated icons will open documents in the formats of PDF , LibreOffice Impress(Open Source; PowerPoint compatible) and WinZip (some documents only available on CD version). Free downloadable versions of Acrobat Reader (pdf) and WinZip are available at http://www.download.com. can be obtained at http://www.libreoffice.org/. Links have been checked by KLinkStatus (Linux Freeware); no broken links (everything points to something) and no orphaned files.

2. Curriculum Vitae

Name:  Peter Stallinga Institutional address: Universidade do Algarve, FCT-DEEI, Campus de Gambelas, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal Tel: +351-289863764 FAX: N/A e-mail: Social networks:     Skype: pstallinga     Facebook: Peter Stallinga     Twitter: N/A     LinkedIn: N/A     ResearchGate: P. Stallinga     ORCID: 0000-0002-9581-6875

Main scientific area of research:
    Physics of electronic materials
    Other scientific areas of interest: Informatics, Electronics, Biotechnology

Academic degrees:
    Agregação in Physics, University of Porto, 2012.
    PhD in Physics, University of Amsterdam, 1994. Thesis title “Investigation of selected paramagnetic centers in semiconductors”
    drs ('Masters') in (informatics within) Physics, University of Amsterdam, 1988. Thesis title "Digitale lock in amplifier"

Present position:
    Professor Associado com Agregação, Universidade do Algarve, Portugal, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Department of Electronic Engineering and Informatics, 2012-

Previous positions:
    Professor Associado, Universidade do Algarve, Portugal, 2012-2012
    Professor Auxiliar with definitive assignment, 2005-2012
    Professor Auxiliar, University of The Algarve, Portugal, 2000-2005
    Professor Auxiliar Convidado, University of The Algarve, Portugal, 1999-2000
    PostDoc, University of The Algarve, Portugal, 1997-1999 Electrical characterization of Organic semiconductors.
    PostDoc, University of Aarhus, Denmark, 1995-1997 Magnetic resonance of hydrogen-related centers in silicon
    PostDoc, University of California at Berkeley, USA, 1994-1995 Magnetic Resonance and optical characterization of defects in III-V semiconductors

Language skills:
    Dutch (native)
    English (fluent)
    Portuguese (fluent)
    German (speaking, writing)
    French (understanding)
    Polish (basic level)

List of Publications:
    (all) in pdf format

Letters of Recommendation:
   

Other documents:
    Bewijs van goed gedrag (good behavior).
    Millitary service status.
    Prize. Caixa Ideias 2010. 12th - 27th place.

Introduction Most scientific work was carried out at the University of The Algarve (UAlg) in the laboratory of OptoEl (later embedded into the Center for Electronics Opto-Electronics and Telecommunications, CEOT). I am at the moment 100% dedicated to CEOT, although many cooperations exists with other research groups in UAlg, Portugal (Lisboa) and Europe.

Highlights
The research up to April 2010 can be divided into the following branches (in chronological order)

• Defects in Semiconductors (Magnetic Resonance)
• Organic Electronics
• Sensing
• Electronic Instrumentation
• Biotechnology
• The Climate (hobby)
  

This was preformed in European research networks, such as SELOA and MONA-LISA and national projects with partners in Portugal. In total cooperations exist(ed) with Amsterdam (UvA), Bologna (CNR), Eindhoven (Univ. and Philips Research), Durham (Univ.), Marburg (Univ.), Thiais (Univ.), Wuppertal (Univ.), Pau (Univ.), Glasgow (Univ.), Würzburg (Univ.), Madrid (IMM), Bergen/Mons-Hainaut (Univ.), Cambridge (Univ.), Linköping (Univ.), Łódz (Univ.), Banska Bystrica (Univ.), Lisboa and Aveiro (Univ.), and UFABC (Brasil).

Defects in Semiconductors
Defects, intentionally or unintentionally introduced into the materials determine the electrical characteristics of semiconductors. The study and aquired knowledge of these defects has paved the way for the semiconductor technology to keep following Moore's law, with ever higher density of transistors and ever increasing speed of integrated circuits. As a PhD student in Amsterdam, I used Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) and related resonance techniques (ENDOR, FSE, etc) to study these defects in various semiconductor materials. The main topic was hydrogen in silicon, where the hydrogen was implanted by a 5 MeV particle accelerator into bulk silicon. As a highlight, the obtruse hydrogen molecule was for the first time detected in silicon (Phys. Rev. Lett. (1993)).
In two consecutive PostDoc positions, one in Berkeley (California) and one in Århus (Denmark), the work was continued. In Berkeley other materials and techniques were used, including Photo-luminescence (PL) and Magnetic Circular Dichroism (MCD). The long-stranding debate as to the origin of the Arsenic antisite in GaAs was solved (Phys. Rev. B (1998)).
In Århus I returned to the topic of hydrogen in silicon. This time not only with EPR but also FTIR (Fourrier-Transform InfraRed spectroscopy). Many new defects were discovered, some of them for years in vain tried to find by other groups in the world (Phys. Rev. Lett. 1997, 1998, Phys. Rev. B 2002).
For the electronic components of ultrafast modern computers, defects are no longer the limiting factor. Moreover, I realized that the reason for studying radiation defects mainly lies its military aspects. As such he was looking for a new, more society relevant research topic and switched his research area in a dramatic way to Electrical Measurements of Organic Materials at the University of the Algarve, a young and energetic university with high potential in research.

Organic Electronics
The idea in the organic electronics part of the research is characterizing new organic materials for modern electronics. Such "plastic electronics" should, in principle, find applications in low-cost areas such as electronic bar codes. However, plastics, as we all know, have properties that can be tailor made and thus also create their own market, in, for example, flexible electronics or displays. As an example is the major advance in printed electronics using standard printing techniques such as offset printing, etc. This kind of electronic devices can only be made with organic materials.
The applications of plastic electronics can thus be subdivided into light-emitting devices and current-control devices. The example for the first is LEDs (light-emitting diodes), while for the latter an FET (field-effect transistor) is the classical example. The research effort is more or less divided equally over these two areas. The OptoEl laboratory, in which I am working, is involved in both areas. The first years were spent on two-terminal devices (Schottky diodes and pn bipolar diodes) for optical applications using impedance spectroscopy. As a highlight, a system was built that could measure deep levels in organic devices. This variant of DLTS (deep-level transient spectroscopy) was at that time the first successful DLTS experiment in organic materials, whereas DLTS is a standard characterization technique for in-organic materials such as Si, AlGaAs and InP, see J. Appl. Phys. (2001).
In the latter years research was focused on three-terminal devices, namely thin-film FETs. Over the years it has become clear that organic materials in FETs behave similar to amorphous silicon. In particular, most organic materials cannot be grown easily in mono-crystalline form and they consequently are trap-ridden. This causes an efficient trapping of mobile charges onto deep levels from whence they are difficult to be removed. Side effects of these traps are 1) Non-exponentially decaying currents with times scales milliseconds to days. 2) Gate-bias dependent effective charge mobility. 3) Drain-bias dependent effective mobility. 4) Stressing (continuous increase of the threshold voltage on time in operation) 5) Thermally activated currents 6) Meyer-Neldel rule observation (activation energy of current depends on bias conditions). This has been summarized in publications in J. Appl. Phys (2004) and Org. Electr. (2006). Moreover, non-linear effects are often attributed to the contacts. While we have shown this to be incorrect (non-linear effects are a result of the Poole-Frenkel type of conduction), it left room for a correct description of the contacts, which are best described by metal-metal junctions, see Org. Electr. (2008).

During a visit to the research group of Dr. Michele Muccini, a light-emitting field-effect transistor (LE-FET) was fabricated and measured. This merits to be highlighted because it was, to our knowledge, the first such device in the world (Synth. Metals, 2004). Recently, a cooperation was started with the University of Hong Kong for developing electronic devices based on DNA. In this approach, DNA is treated as any other organic material, with the advantage of the capability of DNA to self assemble and self organize. This will enable to bridge the gap to molecular electronics. A metal transistor was predicted by me as a direct result of the way the thin-film transistor was modeled. Because the device with a metal for the active layer fully behaved as a transistor, with the source-drain current programmed by the gate-bias the device worked as a proof-of-principle for the Algarve Model for transistors. The metal transistor was considered innovation of the year in Asia in 2008. See for instance the Research Highlight in Nature Asia Materials, 6 August 2008. And received at lot of attention of the media (TV, radio, paper media, etc.). As an unexpected side effect, in cooperation with electronics colleagues (Prof. Bastos), the transistor is found to be possibly much faster than state-of-the art silicon transistors of equal dimensions. The potential implications of this are of course enormous. All these ideas of a decade of research were summarized in the book "Electrical Characterization of Organic Electronic Materials and Devices" (Wiley 2009), see image of book cover shown here.

Sensing
Building on the knowledge of electrical measurements described above two projects were started in the OptoEl lab.
Measuring living biological entities using impedance spectroscopy (Bio-FET) in a cooperation with Prof. Leonor Cancela of the Center of Marine Sciences (Centro de Ciências do Mar). The initial plan was to use FETs as sensing devices to measure the activity of living cells. Later it was discovered that using impedance spectroscopy in a micro-electrode array, the monitoring is much more effective. The interaction of antibodies of sea shells with parasites was measured in the evolution of loss-tangent (1/ωRC) (IEEE Sensors 2004).
In a contemporary project, FETs, based on the organic material sexithiophene (T6) were used in sensing the vapor of TNT commonly found in land mines. This research was driven by the need for a cheap and reliable (especially avoiding so-called "false negatives") sensors to remove the hundreds of millions of land mines still scattered over our planet, leftovers from less peaceful times. The use of FETs for the sensing is justified by their property of being multi-parametric. While simple resistors could, in principle, also respond to the TNT molecules, their response is less selective, since the only thing that can change is the resistance value. FETs have more parameters, such as mobility, threshold voltage and leakage current. Monitoring all parameters simultaneously increases the selectivity to, for instance, distinguish between exposure to oxygen and TNT (IEEE Sensors 2004).
In 2011 a start-up company Vinyar, was created that tries to address the problem of wine-production failure due to airborne fungi. The idea is to develop sensing systems to detect and eliminate the main agent causing the failure of wine.

Scientific Instrumentation
Optoel being a new laboratory, everything had to be set up nearly from scratch  Moreover, my background was not in the electrical measurements area but magnetic resonance instead. As a postdoc in the period 1997-1999 I learned the electrical measurement techniques, specifically impedance measurements.
Over the years, a variety of measurement systems has been developed by me, thus turning OptoEl into an instrumentation experts group. These measurements systems include
- RCL (resistance, capacitance, inductance) Impedance measurements in the range 50 Hz - 1 MHz based on Fluke PM6306 RCL Bridge. Measuring: Spectra, RCV Curves and Transients.
- LF-RCL (low frequency RCL) Low frequency impedance measurements in the range of 1 mHz - 100 kHz home designed, based on a Stanford Research Systems Lock-In Detector SR830.
- FET (field effect transistor) measurement system, home built, based on a Keithley 487 picoammeter and a Hewlett Packard 6614C equipment, measuring IV curves, transfer curves and transients.
- TSC/TSCAP (temperature scanned current/capacitance) for determining traps and current processes in electronic materials.
- DLTS (deep-level transient-spectroscopy) system dedicated to low conductivity materials.
- Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM). Measuring resonance frequency with a Pendulum 666 frequency counter
- Measuring the full impedance spectrum with an HP 8712C Network Analyzer.
The latter two were used in a cooperation with the CBME (Centro de Biomedicina Molecular e Estrutural) research center to measure the kinetics of chemical reactions, in particular as detectors for DNA and antibodies (Biosens. and Bioelectr. (2007), J. Molec. Recognit. (2009)). My PhD student, João Encarnação graduated in 2008 in this field. Thesis title "Development of Biosensors for Molecular Analysis".
Moreover, I have a background in informatics (studied Experimental Physics with Informatics branch in Amsterdam) and gained knowledge in "interfacing" (connecting equipment to computers for control and data acquisition). Especially the combination of knowledge in Informatics and one of the Natural Sciences is not often encountered. For this reason, I was often invited to help set up the technical equipment in other laboratories. As an example, often visits were made to the group of Prof. Jorge Morgado in Lisboa to help with their set-up, or the program Hyper Cromo to measure impedance spectra transients custom made for the research group of Prof. Guilherme Ferreira at CBME-Faro. More elaborate projects were undertaken with the group of Dr. Michele Muccini in CNR Bologna. Custom-made applications were developed in LabVIEW, Visual Studio and PASCAL.

The Climate For some time our society is pestered by a pessimistic outlook for the climate. How can that be? Not twenty years ago there was no such thing as Global Warming. 30 years ago the idea was Global Cooling. Moreover, how can it be that one of the most harmless substances on earth, carbon dioxide, is attributed the role of responsible agent? Passionate for the weather and climate since early childhood, I have been studying both sides of the debate and can only conclude that Global Warming is the result of the political way the subject is treated. With international political bodies such as the IPCC dictating the science, the outcome of 'research' is inevitable. The ideas were summarized in a book "De Mythe Van Klimaatsveranderingen" (Lulu 2010, in Dutch). This will hopefully reopen the discussion in the scientifically unhealthy area where saying anything against the models of Global Warming is considered a crime against humanity. The publication of the book was basis for an interview with Noord Hollands Dagblad, 2010. See short on-line version here. As well as several seminars were given, see presentations list below. Several papers were submitted to peer-review journals. Some have been accepted with the utmost difficulty. It is my experience that referees use gut-feeling for rejecting the manuscripts. Still, the truth will prevail. See the special page about the climate maintained by me: http://www.stallinga.org/Climate/index.html. It is not possible to base a career on scientifically analyzing the climate.

Economy. Europe is in crisis. Why? What is the problem? We have infrastructures to produce things, yet people are getting poorer. What is going on here? The problem is in our monetary system. A system that was invented to avoid a crisis of overproduction (as predicted by Karl Marx) and now seems to be running itself into trouble. http://www.stallinga.org/Economy/index.html

Biology. Overlapping with instrumentation, the idea is to electrically measure living things. Starting with plants. Currently we are measuring plant impedance spectroscopy.

A cooperation was established with the research center CBME (Centro de Biomedicina Molecular e Estrutural) of the University of the Algarve, specifically with Prof. Guilherme Ferreira and Eng. João Encarnação. In this cooperation, a system was set up to measure the resonant frequency of quartz crystals with an immediate application the study of the kinetics of chemical reactions and sensors for DNA. A talk was given in the CEOT research center about the progress in February of 2005 (). I regularly participated in the meetings of the CBME research center.

Two one-month visits were made to the Istituto di Spettroscopia Molecolare, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Bologna, Italy, in the group of Dr. Michele Muccini: July 2002 : In-situ measurements were carried out of field-effect transistors of BDT and tetracene. July 2003 : A measurement system ("BolognaFET") was set up for field effect transistors. FETs of terrylene and tetracene were measured. A light-emitting field-effect-transistor, LE-FET (the first in the world) was fabricated and characterized. A system ("PulseFET") was set up for measuring FETs with ultra-short pulses (20 ns) which is based on a ultra-fast, high band width, oscillosope of LeCroy and a pulse generator of Agilent.

A cooperation was started with the Hong Kong University on the measurement of electronic devices based on DNA materials. This is still in very early stages. The first results are on a field-effect transistor. The person directly involved is Dr. V.A.L. Roy at The Department of Chemistry of The University of Hong Kong. Another cooperation with them is the fabrication of the metal transistor. (Advanced Materials 20, 2120 (2008)).

De Universiteit van Amsterdam. During a sabbatical leave the Space Separated Quantum Cutting was discovered and worked out. This resulted in a publication in Nature Photonics. (Nature Photonics 2, 105 (2008)). Due to the relevance for society (any increase in energetic efficiency means decrease in CO2 emissions), this paper received a lot of national and international attention. See for instance Diário de Notícias 23 February 2008, page 40, page 41. Correio de Manhã 2 February 2008, on-line. NRC (Dutch), paper version, internet version. Press Release (by P.S.)

Connections have been established with Prof. Adriano Benvenho of the Federal University of ABC, where research is done on electronic materials and devices

Summary
I started with a teaching load of 12 hours per week in the first year. This is quite heavy, especially for someone that has to learn the language and the topic. On average, an hour of theoretical classes takes about 3 hours more in preparation and an hour of practical classes about 1 hour more. Responsibility for a discipline, especially those with a large number of students consumes a lot of time too. This, of course, all depends on the quality of the lectures. In general, it can be said that any preparation in electronic format doubles the time spent. This applies to all the types of documentation, also, for instance, the administration around the lectures.
A lecture load of 12 hours means that it is a full job and doesn't leave any time for science. Only after some years, when a stable position has been won at the department with respect to the DSD (distribution of services of docents), a little more time was liberated for science.
However, preparing the lectures well gives more peace of mind when talking in Portuguese in front of a class. Moreover, students at a university deserve high quality lectures. Also, lectures well prepared gives less work in following years. This shows once more the importance of having a stable DSD for the quality of education. I always prepared my lectures in the best possible way. Add to this the fact that "knowledge should not only be hunted for the love of knowing, but also to share it with your own brothers" (Umberto Eco in The Island of the Previous Day). My background is in Physics, but I am employed in the department of Electronics and Informatics. For informatics I already had a reasonable knowledge (studied Experimental Physics, Informatics branch in Amsterdam), but especially for Electronics I had to study a lot to reach a university level.
Up to this point I have given 16 different disciplines (7 when considering the months of lecturing in Electronics I in a semester that changed halfway). Of those disciplines, many of them were my responsibility. For these disciplines, namely Introduction to Computing (Introdução à Computação), Programming I (Programação I, later renamed Imperative Programming, Programação Imperativa), Electronics II  (Electrónica II), Physics of Electronic Components (Fundamentos de Componentes Electrónicos) and Electronic Instrumentation (Instrumentação Electrónica), Telecom Network Systems (Sistemas de Redes de Telecomunicações), I wrote the lecture notes ("sebenta") and exercises. The Instrumentation is currently written up into a book to be published by Wiley. The first two are in HTML format for easy access of the students studying at home and in the classroom. All the lectures notes were made available on-line not only to the university students but to everybody in the world, since I am a big fan of the MIT idea of Open Courseware. All this can be found in the annex or following the links in the table below. For the informatics theoretical lectures, initially transparencies were used. For the other lectures, the blackboard was used. In more recent years datashows arrived at the university. Powerpoint presentations were prepared by me for the informatics lectures, see the links below (to save paper, these are not included in the hardcopy of this document).

The highlight for 2012 is working on a book about the lectures of Electronic Instrumentation. This is a work in progress that is expected to be finished in summer of 2014 and will have about 300 pages.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that on-line educational software was written that simulates complicated physical ideas of electronic components. For compatibility reasons, these simulations were written in Java applets and were embedded into HTML pages. Click on the icon Java or follow this link to see the simulations: http://www.stallinga.org/AcadActiv/Lectures/Java/index.html. On the CD it can be found here.

Other pedagogic activities

Final Year Projects:
  José Almada and Nelson Pimenta, Final-year project  of ESC named "Measuring FET parameters as a function of frequency" (Parâmetros de FET's em Função de Frequência), 4 November 2003.
  Diogo Emanuel de Moura Lobo and Carlos Miguel Fernandes Dias, Final-year project of ESI named "Implementation of QCM mesaurement system", 2005-2006.
In 2005, a student from Ryszard Łazarski University of Commerce and Law visited me to do a one month stage in OptoEl.

(Co)Supervisor of PhD student, João Encarnação, "Development of biosensors for the malaria setting", SFRH/BD/12772/2003. Graduated January 2008 Thesis title: "Development of Biosensors for Molecular Analysis".
Supervisor Starting Investigator (BIC) André Romão, 2005.

In 2000, I was invited to give lectures at the SELOA Summer School in Bologna. The details of the lecture and the link to the handouts are
  "Electrical Characterization of Organic Semiconductors", Peter Stallinga, 2000.
Later an additional document in the same style was added:
  "Theory of (organic) (thin film) Field-Effect Transistors", Peter Stallinga, 2004.
Finally, I guided two students of the course of Informatics Teaching (Ensino de Informática) and evaluated them when they were doing their stage on a secondary school in Odemira. This involved going to the school and sitting-in at their lectures and determining their (scientific) quality. In this way I got an idea about the educational system of Portugal. Some interesting aspect about the total arbitrariness of the lectures atributed by my colleagues to their students. See document here.

5. Administrative Activity

Vice Course Director (Subdirector de Curso) of the course LESI (Licenciatura de Engenharia de Sistemas e Informática, formerly known as ESC, Engenharia de Sistemas e Computação).
While being vice director of ESC/LESI, I helped in the organization of the department, for instance in the open days and other forms of advertising our courses. Examples are the design of the brochures for LESI in 2004 and 2005, see attachments and .
Course Director (Director de Curso) of the course LESI in 2006.
Member of the course direction (Direcção de curos) of the course Physics 2009-2012
Course Director (Director de Curso) of the course MIEET, 2013-

Organisation of the books. For the past years, I was responsible for the organization of the acquisition of new books for the department.

Cientific Councils. As any other doctorate member I participated in the departments administrative bodies of the Scientific Council (Conselho Cietífico) of the department DEEI and the faculty FCT. I attended most of the meetings to which he was invited.

Network meeting organizer. Helping organizing network meetings for SELOA and MONA-LISA (2001). Twice the European network held a meeting in Faro. First the SELOA network and later the MONA-LISA network.

A spin-off company, named Vinyar, was started that addresses the problem of air quality control at wine production facilities. The problem consists of the airborne fungi that enter the bottle at the time of botteling of the wine. It is estimated that some 1% of all wine in Portugal is lost every year due to this problem. In a country with a substantial wine industry -- of about 1 billion euros per year -- this is obviously a huge problem. The direct damage is in the order of tens of millions of euros per year, but the damage goes much beyond direct physical damage. Every bottle that is opened and that smelss of 'rotting cork' destroys the image of the wine house and should thus be avoided at all cost. The idea is to develop sensing systems to detect and eliminate the main agent causing this failure of wine. See the business presentation here.

	Opto-El. logo was designed in 1997 and is based on the logo of The University of The Algarve (see in the beginning on the right of this document). The Univeristy logo with its excentric circles symbolizes the spreading of knowledge in the direct area of the university, namely The Algarve. The Opto-El logo incorporates the university logo which represents that Opto-El wholeheartedly supports the idealogy of the university. The electronic components added to the University logo represent the electronic nature of the laboratory. Moreover, the FET, in series with an LED and ground symbolize that "While we have everything under control, we are brilliant, but remain with our feet on the ground". The resulting mono-chrome image is very modern and is also good when printed in black and white or in inverse colors. The disadvantage is that it is a little too detailed and as such doesn't follow modern design conventions, which favors simpler designs. Moreover, the lines of the electronic paths are too thick. The logo was designed with the PjotrSoft (Peter Stallinga) PASCAL graphics toolbox (EPSTool) with output in (Encapsulated) PostScript.
	The CEOT logo was designed at the onset of the research center, in 2001. The three facets of the cube represent the three legs of the research center, namely Electronics, Opto-electronics and Tele-communications. Later, in practice, the legs have integrated and the edges have blurred. The sphere with the C, in comparison to the cube being of different geometric shape, symbolizes that were are not uniformist and can approach a problem in many ways and shows the strength of the research center. The combination of the sphere and especially the cube gives the logo a three dimensional character and, adding to this, the pastel colors gives it a pleasant look. Moreover, the logo lends itself very well to manipulations in the modern informatics world (read internet pages), see for instance the CEOT pages, but is less adequate for black-and-white representations. For this purpose (hardcopy commucations) a mono-chrome version was designed contemporarily. The logo was designed with Corel Draw 8 (due to font incompatibilities in the Corel Draw versions, it is no longer readible in version 10).
	The OrgEl logo was designed in 2009 and once again it is based on the University logo of the four eccentric circles. The idea was to use the same 'atmosphere' of the rings that can be seen as the letter 'O' and use the same style to write a letter 'E', thus forming a acronym OE. The logo was designed using EPSTool with output in (Encapsulated) PostScript.
	Modern design with social-networks-badge-like round aspects and minimal on the colors. A bunch of grapes composed of benzene rings with a alhohol stem to show the link with chemistry.