ECE Advisory Board

Andrew Fong is the Global Product Manager for logic conductor etch products at Applied Materials where he enjoys working with all of the leading-edge logic and foundry customers, and determining winning product solutions that enable the future of smaller and more powerful transistor devices. Prior to Applied Materials, Andrew spent nine years at Lam Research where he focused on dielectric etch chamber development. Andrew developed novel RF pulsed plasma technologies that enabled the scaling and production of 3D NAND memory. He was also the technical lead for logic dielectric etch chambers debuting unique high-speed plasma/RF controls enabling atomic layer etch for 10nm and smaller nodes.

Andrew graduated from UCD ECE with a BSEE in 2011 and has maintained close relations with the department ever since by championing for increased student knowledge of industry norms/operations and advocating for the semiconductor device manufacturing segment. Andrew also holds an M.S. in systems engineering from SJSU, and served on the ECE Industry Advisory Board before joining the Board of Advisors. In his spare time Andrew enjoys going to Cars and “Hot Chocolate” with his daughter and creating content for his automotive YouTube channel.

Jack Kotovsky is the Micro and Nanotechnology Section Leader at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).  Jack has worked at LLNL in the Materials Engineering Division for 20 years.  As the section leader, he owns management responsibility for research staff supporting Micro and Nanotechnologies, biomedical engineering, and additive manufacturing.

In his technical roles, Jack leads efforts to create novel MEMs and optic-fiber-based sensors to support the Stockpile Stewardship mission.  He has led a broad variety of technical projects including the fingerprinting and tamper-proofing nuclear weapon inventories for international treaty control, creating thermal safety systems for lithium-ion battery packs and building new methods to study traumatic brain injury.  He currently runs a large project to create next-generation thermal management approaches for future high-power laser systems. 

Jack earned a mechanical engineering Ph.D. from UC Davis in 2005, a business degree from Le Collège des Ingénieurs in Paris in 1993 and mechanical engineering B.S. and M.S. degrees from M.I.T. in 1990 and 1992.  He holds 15 patents and strives to transition his inventions to broad government and commercial use.  Last year he received the Secretary of Energy award for his efforts related to the pandemic response by creating an FDA-approved ventilator in 5 weeks.

Michelle Leyden Li is Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for GlobalFoundries. Ms. Leyden Li has more than 25 years of experience in marketing, branding, communications and business development with a successful track record of building marketing programs that leverage brand awareness into profitable revenue growth.

Michelle joined GlobalFoundries in 2015 as Vice President and Head of Sales for its U.S. West Region and in 2019 she spearheaded a marketing discipline for the company. Prior to GlobalFoundries, she held senior leadership positions with semiconductor companies such as Qualcomm and Intel where she drove brand development for two of the industry’s most iconic ingredient brands - Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platform and Intel Centrino Mobile Technology.

Michelle holds a Juris Doctorate from King Hall School of Law at UC Davis, a Master of Business Administration UC Davis, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the State University of New York at Purchase.

Ying Y. Tai is a Senior Director in Non-Volatile Engineering at Micron Technology, where he is leading the innovation effort in latest hardware and software architectures for NVM-based storage systems. From 2017 to 2019, he led end-to-end engineering teams to deliver Micron's first and the world’s fastest SSD (X100) based on 3DXP in less than 2 years from the concept to customer samples. Prior to Micron Technology, he held senior technical and management leadership positions in the areas of data storage and communications at VIA Technologies, SanDisk Corporation, Cadence Design Systems, Boeing Satellite Systems, and Ikanos Communications.

His technical interests fall in signal processing, error correction coding, computer architecture, and non-volatile memory-based memory and storage system. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He also holds more than 50 issued US patents. In addition, Dr. Tai is a Senior Member of IEEE and a recipient of IEEE Communications Society Stephan O. Rice Prize.

Ying received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2006. He also earned his M.S and B.S. degrees from Stanford University and National Sun Yat-Sen University, respectively.