Departure Fred Brouwer: photochemistry research at ARCNL ends

Group leader Fred Brouwer has left ARCNL on March 1st. He will continue to work as full-time professor at the Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Brouwer contributed to the original plans for ARCNL in 2013 and he has been with ARCNL since the start of the institute in 2014. Over the years he has continued to work as professor at the UvA while setting up ARCNL’s nanophotochemistry research that focuses on the mechanisms by which extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light leads to chemical changes in existing and new classes of photoresist materials. With that research, Brouwer has made significant contributions to the exploration of unknown scientific territory with a high relevance for application in the semiconductor industry.

With the start of the second group leader on photoresist materials, Sonia Castellanos Ortega, in 2016, the team rapidly grew in size and was able to significantly step up its research activities. Looking back Brouwer remembers many days spent at synchrotron facilities where he and Castellanos Ortega and their group members unraveled how the photoresist materials work using advanced spectroscopy techniques and explored the performance limits under EUV illumination of the materials that they developed.

Castellanos Ortega left ARCNL in 2020 to start a position at the American photoresist company Inpria, stationed at IMEC in Leuven (Belgium), which means that with Brouwer’s departure the photochemistry-oriented research activities at ARCNL come to an end.

During the past eight years Brouwer’s work has resulted in 39 publications and he has supervised five PhD students at ARCNL that graduated at the UvA, which establishes a major contribution to the total scientific output of the institute over this period.

ARCNL says goodbye to Fred Brouwer with a sense of melancholy and with deep gratitude.