John F. Currie, Ph.D. Science & Engineering Consulting
About the consultant

A career built at the interface of physics and engineering.

From sine-Gordon soliton theory at Cornell, through MOS and III-V device fabrication at École Polytechnique de Montréal, to the invention and commercialization of non-invasive transdermal biosensors at Cambridge Medical Technologies — fifty years of consistently building what had never been built before.

Biography

John F. Currie earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, and his M.Sc. in Physics, from the University of Toronto. He completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Cornell University in 1977 with a thesis on the classical and statistical mechanics of nonlinear fields — a body of work that produced influential early papers on sine-Gordon soliton dynamics and on the thermodynamics of nonlinear scalar fields in condensed-matter physics. He then spent a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT working concurrently in Physical Chemistry and in Materials Science and Engineering.

From 1978 onward Dr. Currie has held tenured faculty appointments at three universities, supervising more than thirty Ph.D. and M.Sc. students and dozens of postdoctoral fellows. Most of these former students now hold leadership positions in industry and academia. He has personally taught more than five thousand undergraduate and graduate students in physics, engineering, general science, and pre-medical programs.

In parallel with his academic career, Dr. Currie has been the founding director of four research laboratories and an active inventor with a continuously growing patent portfolio. His current work, conducted as Chief Science Officer of Cambridge Medical Technologies, focuses on the painless, non-intrusive transdermal sampling and electrochemical analysis of interstitial fluid for the quantitative measurement of glucose, lactate, ethyl alcohol, bilirubin, cholesterol, melatonin, troponin, and other clinically important analytes.

Academic appointments

  • 2024 –Professor Emeritus of Physics, Georgetown University
  • 1997 – 2024Full Professor of Physics, and of Pharmacology, Georgetown University
  • 1997 – 2007Director, GAEL: Georgetown Advanced Electronics Lab, Health Microsystems
  • 2002 – 2006Visiting Scientist, Division of Casualty Research, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
  • 1995 – 1998Adjunct Professor, Electrical Engineering, McGill University
  • 1992 – 1997Director, LISA: Laboratory for the Integration of Sensors and Actuators, École Polytechnique
  • 1990 – 1996Director, MODFAB: Laboratory for the Fabrication of Microelectronic and Optoelectronic Devices, École Polytechnique
  • 1990 – 1997Director, EMMEE: Microelectronic and Micro-Electromechanical Device Research, École Polytechnique / Concordia
  • 1990 – 1995Associate Director, GCM: Thin Film Research Group, École Polytechnique / Université de Montréal
  • 1989 – 1997Full Professor of Engineering Physics, École Polytechnique de Montréal
  • 1986 – 1997Head of Solid-State Physics, Department of Engineering Physics, École Polytechnique
  • 1982 – 1989Associate Professor of Engineering Physics, École Polytechnique
  • 1978 – 1982Assistant Professor of Engineering Physics, École Polytechnique

Industry & consulting roles

  • 2016 –Chief Science Officer, Cambridge Medical Technologies, LLC
  • 2006 – 2014Science & Engineering Consultant, Flexible Medical Systems, LLC
  • 1996 – 1997Noranda Professor for Advanced Materials (NORMA); R&D mandate to add commercial value to precious metals and semi-metals through novel solid-state processing technologies
  • 1995 – 1998Photonic Technology Program lead, Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research — Centre of Excellence
  • 1994 – 1997Faculty Associate, Canadian Pulp & Paper Institute (PAPRICAN); Member of POLNOR and TENOR projects, Noranda Advanced Materials Division
  • 1983 – 1984Bell Northern Research & Northern Telecom Electronics Ltd. (now Nortel)

Research themes

Dr. Currie's published and patented research falls into five primary domains: (i) health microsystems and biosensors, including the painless transdermal sampling devices now central to Cambridge Medical Technologies; (ii) solid-state physical electronics, including the seminal work on interface and bandgap engineering of InP-based metal-insulator-semiconductor structures and the first high-speed InP/InGaAs heterojunction insulated-gate FETs operating at frequencies as high as 6 GHz; (iii) multilayer thin-film physics and technology, including diffusion-barrier metallization for VLSI integrated circuits and solid-state superionic conducting films for alkaline micro-ionic devices; (iv) sensors and actuators, including optoelectronic, micro-electromechanical, and electrochemical microsystems for gas detection and environmental monitoring; and (v) physics and chemistry of surfaces and interfaces, where he was among the first internationally to apply Elastic Recoil Detection nuclear scattering to thin-film characterization, coupled with XPS, AES, SIMS, STM, AFM, XRD, and electron microscopy.

Honors and select advisory roles

  • 1996 – 1997Noranda Professor for Advanced Materials (NORMA)
  • 1995 – 1998Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research Center of Excellence: Lead, Photonic Technology Program
  • 1994 – 1997PAPRICAN Faculty Associate (Canadian Pulp & Paper Institute)