Dr. Obeng received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana in 1982, a Ph.D.

in Chemistry from University of Miami in 1988, and a MBA from the Crummer School of Business, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida 1996.He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin from 1989 to 1991.

Dr. Obeng has worked for AT&T / Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories, Agere Systems before co-founding psiloQuest, Inc. and Nkanea Technologies, Inc. He has also worked for Texas Instruments, Clemson University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He is an Adjunct Professor at Clemson University (Clemson, SC) and the University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL). During this time he developed and transferred into production various technologies for Semiconductor Processing. He is the holder over 50 issued US and International patents, and has co-authored over 100 technical publications.

Dr. Obeng is a Charted Chemist (C.Chem) of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemist, a member of the American Chemical Society, the National Organization for Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, the Electrochemical Society and the Material Research Society (MRS).

For example, despite over 30 years of work, high quality directly written metal lines for circuit boards and semiconductors have remained elusive. One of the primary reasons for this has been the attempts by researchers to exclusively use thermal decomposition of precursors as the basis of their technical approach. Metal lines of varying quality have been produced depending on thermal characteristics of the substrate and the metal precursor.

The unique photolytic process pathways of Laser assisted metallization, which allow the interaction between intense optical energy and matter, has the potential of solving this problem.
Such technology will alleviate many of the issues plaguing the wiring of integrated circuits / semiconductor devices and reduce cost. Such pure metal films can also deposited in ceramic supports for use in catalysis.

….Similarly, cold plasma and microwave excitation can be used to engineer surfaces. These energy sources assist in the cracking precursors in to generate unique intermediates that graft onto suitably prepared substrate surfaces. Such plasma assisted coating methods have been demonstrated to create nanoscale functional coatings on inert irregularly shaped polymeric materials under a variety of conditions. The resulting structures have modified surfaces whose physical and chemical properties have been altered to conform to specific applications. Acidic and basic organic coatings as well as grafted ceramic compositions have been demonstrated on materials as divergent as extruded polyethylene and polypropylene to olefinic commercial elastomers and various foam structures. The coatings are conformed to the irregular surface matrixed in the 10-100 micrometer aggregations. With this strategy, application specific nanoscale coatings have been applied to otherwise inert substrates for a wide range of applications.