Mario LANZA

Associate Professor

MSE

Dr. Mario Lanza is an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the National University of Singapore, since August 2024. He got the PhD in Electronic Engineering in 2010 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he won the extraordinary PhD prize. In 2010-2011 he was NSFC postdoctoral fellow at Peking University, and in 2012-2013 he was Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. On September 2013 he joined Soochow University (in China), where he promoted until the rank of Full Professor. Between October 2020 and July 2024 he was full-time Associate Professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (in Saudi Arabia), where he became known for his work in the field of nano-electronics. He has published over 250 research articles in top journals like Nature, Science and Nature Electronics, many of them becoming highly cited. He has been plenary, keynote, tutorial and invited speaker in over 150 conferences, and he has received some of the most prestigious awards in the world (such as the IEEE Fellow). He has been often consulted by leading semiconductor companies and publishers. He is an active member of the board governors of the IEEE – Electron Devices Society, and has been involved in the technical and management committee of top conferences in the field of electron devices, including IEDM, IRPS and IPFA. He speaks fluently five languages: English, Chinese, German, Spanish and Catalan.

Research Interests

Professor Lanza’s research focuses on the development of advanced electronic devices, integrated circuits, and silicon microchips. He has pioneered the introduction of novel nanomaterials, such as 2D materials (like graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, and transition metal dichalcogenides), at the back-end-of-line of silicon microchips. He analyses the amount of local defects in the 2D materials, produced either during material synthesis (native) or material post-processing (evaporation, encapsulation, transfer), as well as their impact in the electronic properties and reliability at the device and circuit level. He is known for mastering scanning probe microscopy, which he has used to gain key information of multiple nano-electronic phenomena, such as: quantum tunneling, trap-assisted tunneling, charge trapping and de-trapping, random telegraph noise, stress-induced leakage current, channel hot carriers, temperature bias instability, time-dependent dielectric breakdown, and resistive switching. He has often worked with memristive devices (pioneering since 2016 the field of 2D-materials-based memristors), and he analysed their application for data storage, computation, encryption, and 5G/6G telecommunications. In 2025, his group revolutionized the field of neuromorphic computing by developing electronic neurons and synapses using only one standard silicon transistor operated in punch-through impact ionization regime; this is something that was believed to be impossible, and that opens up a new horizon for the design and fabrication of energy-efficient hardware for artificial intelligence.

Selected Publications (as first or corresponding author)

  1. Nature 640, 69–76 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08742-4
  2. Nature 640, 613–622 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08733-5
  3. Nature 618, 57–62 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05973-1
  4. Science 376, eabj9979 (2022). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj9979
  5. Nature Nanotechnology, in press (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-025-01988-z
  6. Nature Electronics 7, 856–867 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-024-01233-w
  7. Nature Electronics 7, 557–566 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-024-01192-2
  8. Nature Electronics 6, 260–263 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-023-00954-8
  9. Nature Electronics 4, 775–785 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00672-z
  10. Nature Electronics 3, 638–645 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00473-w
  11. Nature Electronics 2, 221–229 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-019-0264-8
  12. Nature Electronics 1, 458–465 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-018-0118-9
  13. Nature Reviews Materials 9, 358–373 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-024-00661-6
  14. Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering 1, 352–353 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44287-024-00056-3
  15. Nature Communications 15, 4518 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48485-w
  16. Nature Communications 15, 1974 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45670-9

Staff Details

Email Address

mlanza@nus.edu.sg

Location

EA-05-28