Dr. Chanmin Su is the Senior Director of Technology at Bruker Corporation’s Bruker Nano Surfaces for their AFM business. He is the inventor or co-inventor of 26 issued US patents in AFM systems and technologies, including patents for breakthrough PeakForce Tapping technology and the FastScan AFM. Dr. Su received his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Science in 1988. After serving two years as Visiting Scientist at KFA Juelich, one year as Manager for the Center for Microscopy & Microanalysis at the University of Maryland, and two years as Principle Scientist for Raytheon Technical Services Company, he joined Veeco Instruments in 2000 as a Senior Staff Scientist to develop AFM systems. He served as Director of Research from 2005 to 2008, and was appointed Senior Director of Technology upon Veeco’s sale of their instrumentation business to Bruker.
During his tenure with Veeco and Bruker, Dr. Su has initiated and led many product developments leading to new applications of scanning probe technologies. Among them are the Torsional Resonance AFM, TR-TUNA, Adaptive Scanner control, Quantitative Nanomechanical Property Characterization, HarmoniX, high speed AFM and recently ScanAsyst and PeakForce QNM, enabling quantitative mechanical mapping at the molecular scale. Dr. Su was the co-Principal Investigator of the NIST-funded Advanced Technology Program (ATP) for quantitative nanomechanics/high speed AFM (2004-2007) and the Principal Investigator for a more recent ATP project on Nanoscale Subsurface Metrology (2007-2011). He has published over 70 papers and two book chapters on the mechanical properties of bulk/thin film materials and AFM instrumentation, and has been a co-organizer of several international conferences on scanning probe microscopy and chaired sessions in scanning probe-related international.