Eric Lifshin
Eric Lifshin is currently a full professor at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE), University at Albany, State University of New York. He had a long career at GE Global Research starting in 1963 where he served in various positions including Manager of the Characterization and Environmental Technology Laboratory which he held for 25 years prior to his retirement in 2000.
Throughout his career, he has been extensively involved with research relating to many aspects of electron microprobe analysis and scanning electron microscopy. Some of these activities included early work on microprobe automation for the analysis of diffusion couples, specimen current imaging in the SEM, Monte Carlo calculation to better understand spatial resolution for chemical analysis, and he was one of the first people to interface an energy dispersive spectrometer to an SEM. He used the latter to both measure absolute x-ray production efficiencies and determine the shape of the X-ray continuum and thus develop models needed for background subtraction. He is most appreciative of the many colleagues at GE who worked with him over the years. In his current work, he is developing advanced deconvolution techniques for image restoration in the SEM and various types of microanalysis.
Eric Lifshin has published dozens of papers over the course of his career and has received various awards from MAS as well as from elsewhere including two IR100 awards and a best-paper award from ISTFA. He also served as Past-President of MAS and as a national tour speaker. He currently teaches courses in microscopy and microanalysis at CNSE and has been a lecturer at the Lehigh SEM courses since their founding more than 40 years ago. Eric is a co-author of the popular text developed for the general SEM course. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1960’s.