Prof Aaron Thean is the Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost at National University of Singapore. He is also a consulting Fellow to IMEC, a Nano-electronic Research Center, based in Belgium. Before stepping up as Provost, he was the Dean at College of Design and Engineering.

Prior to joining NUS in 2016 as National Research Foundation’s Returning Singaporean Scientist, Prof Thean served as IMEC’s Vice President of Logic Technologies and the Director of the Logic Devices Research. At IMEC, he directed the research and development of advanced device technologies ranging from ultra-scaled FinFETs, Nanowire FETs, to III-V/Ge Channels, Tunnel FETs, to emerging Beyond CMOS logic nano-device architectures based on Spintronics and 2-D materials. He has been involved in Design and Process Technology Co-optimizations (DTCO) of emerging technologies targeting 7nm, 5nm, and beyond. Before 2011, he was with Qualcomm’s CDMA technologies in San Diego, California, USA. There, he led the Strategic Silicon Technologies Group responsible for new System-On-Chip technology definition and DTCO for upcoming Qualcomm technologies. From 2007 to 2009, Aaron served as the International Semiconductor Development Alliance (ISDA) FEOL and Device Manager at IBM, where he co-led an eight-company alliance device/process team to develop the 28-nm and 32-nm low-power bulk CMOS technology at IBM East Fishkill, New York. His team developed the Industry’s first foundry-compatible Gate-First High-k Metal-Gate (HKMG) with novel SiGe channel Low-Power bulk CMOS technologies. It enabled some of today’s most successful smart mobile devices in production by the foundry partners.