HIGHLIGHTS ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2025 58 Moyer Named 2025 George A. Roberts Award Recipient Established by the ASM Materials Education Foundation in 2003, the George A. Roberts Award highlights the importance of educational outreach and is presented annually to an individual “who has made a significant impact to reach students and teachers, in efforts to increase awareness of materials and applied science careers.” The first award recipient was its namesake, George Roberts, who served the materials community with great distinction for many years. The ASM Foundation continues to proudly associate Roberts’ significant impact on science and engineering with this dedicated award. This year’s recipient, Laura Moyer, FASM, has been engaged in K-12 education beyond ASM Materials Camps. She has conducted materials science and engineering demonstrations at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels for the past 10 years. Moyer is also director of the Lehigh University Summer Engineering Institute, a residential program for high school students who want to learn about various types of engineering. THE FACE OF MATERIALS ENGINEERING This profile series features members from around the world at all stages in their careers. Here we speak with Joy Liao, senior manager, system fault isolation, at Nvidia, Santa Clara, California. What attracted you to engineering? Engineering was my escape from chemistry and biology. Math and physics were always my favorite subjects, while chemistry and biology had too many big words to memorize. Born in Taiwan and raised in California, I was (gently) pushed into medicine. Neither liking nor disliking it, I went to UCLA as a pre-med student. At that time, the incoming freshman class had to take placement tests for English and chemistry. I failed the English placement test (no surprise), but was placed in the chemistry honor track. In the third quarter of freshman year, I was required to take a chem lab course that was directly tied to the regular track lecture courses. Although I excelled in lab quizzes and tests, I miserably failed the hands-on experiment part and was awarded a big C for that lab course. A young adult with very minimal reallife experience, I viewed this as a sign for me to abandon chemistry. At the start of sophomore year, a friend from bioengineering told me that she needed to transfer to electrical engineering because her department was being shut down. She asked if we could take the same courses so she wouldn’t be alone. I did and felt right at home with the courses in circuit design. She and I became lifelong friends. I continued on the path and received my B.S, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from UCLA. What is your greatest professional achievement? Since late 2008, Steven Kasapi and I began using a laser voltage imaging (LVI) technique for scan chain analysis. This technique helps us “visualize” transistor behavior. We successfully demonstrated LVI’s effectiveness and efficiency in scan chain analysis, and published results of this design for test-electronic failure analysis (DFT-EFA) workflow at the International Symposium of Test and Failure Analysis (ISTFA) and several other conferences. Because this DFT-EFA workflow does not require proprietary knowledge of the chip’s functionality, we were granted permission from management to enable this workflow at our foundry partners. In 2010-2011, the DFT-EFA workflow was successfully implemented at TSMC, which expanded the foundries’ electrical fault isolation capabilities and sped up yield improvements. What are you working on now? I focus on collaborating with universities. Currently, I’m teamed up with Professor Navid Asadi of University of Florida on AI-enhanced multimodal digital twin validation for advanced packaging and system-level electronics inspection. Favorite motto: Life is short; do the right thing. FACE OF MATERIALS ENGINEERING Laura Moyer (le ) receives the 2025 George A. Roberts Award from Kip Findley at the ASM Awards Banquet in Detroit in October. Liao
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