Andrew S. Huntington

     I was born in March of 1975 into the family of James and Seiko Huntington. I was raised in Pleasant Hill, Oregon: a rural town in the Willamette Valley. My parents' home is located on several acres of land that include gardens, orchards, and fields for livestock. During my misspent youth, I was fascinated by high energy physics, pyrotechnics, and science fiction. Yep, I was well on my way to becoming a bookish introvert. Fortunately, my high school days did much to humanize me.

     Despite this rather promising start, in the spring of '93 I more-or-less derailed my life by choosing to attend college in the netherworld . Despite the best of friends and a satisfactory set of unusual experiences, my time at Caltech was excruciating. Chiefly my discontent stemmed from the three-to-one ratio of men to women, but I'm sure the limited mathematical preparation available in rural Oregon had something to do with it, too. (My friends assure me that Caltech is a fine school, and that I am simply dumb and ugly.) In any event, after four years of suffering I emerged with a BS in chemistry and a lovely computer scientist on my arm - makes you wonder what I was complaining about, huh? Ask me sometime.

     Seeing that I was not yet a worthwhile human being (with the corollary that I was suited only to handle flasks of bubbling goo), I resolved to continue my education in graduate school so that I might make a career of ordering others to handle flasks of goo. I was offered admission to several graduate programs at big-name schools (e.g. MIT, Stanford, Berkeley), but in the end I chose the Department of Materials Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara for my doctoral studies. Although UCSB does not receive instant cocktail party recognition as a premier research facility, it should. (However, it also richly deserves its reputation as a party school for the surfer dudes and nubile coeds who comprise the better portion of its undergraduate program.) I worked there for Professor Larry Coldren from August 1997 through June 2003 as a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) grower. My first three years in graduate school were spent studying a method for lateral carrier confinement inside GaAs-based vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs). Unfortunately, this effort proved fruitless, so in the fall of 2000 I switched tracks to work on long-wavelength VCSEL technology. My dissertation (defended on June 6th, 2003) is titled "Development of Long-Wavelength Avalanche Photodiodes and Vertical-Cavity Lasers for Epitaxial Integration as a Vertical-Cavity Photon Number Amplifier." It has three general topics: improvements in the design and understanding of multiple-active-region VCSELs, growth of revolutionary avalanche photodiodes (in collaboration with Professor Joe Campbell of UT Austin), and the epitaxial integration of these two devices.

     I enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in October of 2002, and shipped to boot camp on June 16th 2003 (about one week after my defense); I became a United States Marine on September 11th 2003. I completed Marine Combat Training at Camp Pendleton, and my MOS school (Marine Artillery Scout Observer Course) at the Marine Battery at Fort Sill, OK and the Expeditionary Warfare Training Group - Pacific, Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado. I graduated at the top of my class (with a meritorious promotion to Lance Corporal) on December 19th 2003 and checked into my first reserve unit (3d Air-Naval Gunfire Liason Company). While with 3d ANGLICO, I attended the US Army Airborne school in September of 2004, graduating on the 24th as a basic parachutist after five qualifying static line jumps. In August of 2005 I transfered to H&S Company, 6th Engineering Support Battalion which is considerably closer to home. I served in a radio operator's billet with the communication platoon before dropping to the individual ready reserve (IRR) on June 15th, 2007. I was promoted to Corporal while in the IRR, on October 1st, 2007. On November 13th 2010 I was honorably discharged from the IRR.

     As Product Engineer for APD Devices at Voxtel, I am in charge of several avalanche photodiode development programs.

     I wed Sarah on January 18th 2004. My daughter Elizabeth was born in late July of 2008. My second daughter, Victoria, was born in late February 2010. In February 2011, we will close on our first house.