Paul G. Kotula
Paul Kotula is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Materials Characterization Department at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. Paul received his B.S. from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, both in Materials Science and Engineering. Before joining Sandia, he was a Director-Funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
His work at Sandia includes analytical electron microscopy support for microelectronic and micro-electromechanical device development, welding, brazing, soldering, forensics, process feedback, failure analysis, and 3D materials characterization and microanalysis.
He is the Principal Investigator for a project for the Department of Homeland Security on the development of better analytical techniques for forensics and attribution of bio-weapon materials and has also helped build a world-renowned research program on the acquisition and automated multivariate statistical analysis of spectral image data sets. The software developed from this work for x-ray microanalysis is commercially available from Thermo Fisher Scientific and is now in over 200 labs worldwide. Paul’s work has also garnered several awards over the years, among them an R&D 100 Award in 2002, two MAS Outstanding Paper Awards (Macres, 2000; Birks, 2004), and two Best Analytical Techniques paper of the year in the society journal, Microscopy and Microanalysis (2003, 2006).
Paul has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University since 2001 and has authored or co-authored over 50 journal articles on a wide variety of topics involving electron microscopy and microanalysis as well as two patents and two book chapters. His work has been featured on two journal covers and he has given over 10 invited/keynote presentations at international meetings and over 30 at domestic meetings.