Tsunenobu Kimoto received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1986 and 1988, respectively. He joined Sumitomo Electric Industries, LTD in 1988, where he conducted research and development of amorphous Si solar cells and semiconducting diamond material. In 1990, he started his academic career as a Research Associate at Kyoto University, and received the Ph.D. degree from Kyoto University in 1996, based on his work on SiC growth and device fabrication. In 1996–1997, he was a visiting scientist at Linköping University, Sweden. He is currently Professor at the Department of Electronic Science and Engineering, Kyoto University.

His main research activity includes SiC epitaxial growth, optical and electrical characterization, defect electronics, ion implantation, MOS physics, and high-voltage devices. He has also been involved in nanoscale Si, Ge devices, novel materials for nonvolatile memory, and GaN-based electron devices. He is a member of IEEE, MRS, JSAP, IEICE, and IEE.

James A. Cooper received his BSEE and MSEE degrees from Mississippi State University and Stanford University in 1968 and 1969, respectively. From 1968 to 1970 he was a staff member at Sandia National Laboratories. He attended Purdue University from 1970 to 1973, where he received his Ph.D. for generalizing the theory of the MOS conductance technique. He joined Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, in 1973. At Bell Labs he designed CMOS integrated circuits, including AT&T's first microprocessor, and conducted research on high-field transport in silicon inversion layers. He joined the faculty of Purdue University in 1983 and is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

From 1983 to 1990 he explored dynamic memories in GaAs, and he began working in SiC in 1990. His group demonstrated the first SiC DMOSFETs and the first SiC digital integrated circuits, and contributed to the development of Schottky diodes, UMOSFETs, lateral DMOSFETs, BJTs, and IGBTs. They have also investigated a variety of other SiC devices, including thyristors, CCDs, MESFETs, SITs, and IMPATT diodes.

A Life Fellow of the IEEE, Professor Cooper has held the Charles William Harrison and Jai N. Gupta chairs in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, and was founding co-director of Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center.