EPSCoR/IDeA Foundation

Daryush ILA is an expert in ion-matter interactions and nanoscale materials/device fabrication and has authored or coauthored over 250 publications, nine books, one book chapter, over 40 invited talks and two patents in this area. At Alabama A&M University, he has built up a research program that has garnered more than $45 million and has led to the creation of the AAMU Research Institute, a 100% independently supported, university-owned 501c(3) entity that serves as the contracting arm of AAMU. As director and co-founder, ILA has built partnerships that have helped win more than $125 million in grants and contracts – more than $40 million of which were from the Department of Defense alone. ILA as a faculty member supervised or co-supervised over 35 MS Theses and PhD Dissertations and provided summer trainee for over fifty students since the 1990s. Ila has two patent applications filed, one on a process for producing highly efficient thermoelectric materials (completed) and one on production of nanopores for filtration, with the potential for DNA sequencing (under review).

ILA also founded the Center for Irradiation of Materials at AAMU, and serves as its director. In addition to his AAMU responsibilities, ILA served as the Campus Director of AAMU-Space Grant Consortium (since 1989), Secretary of South Eastern Section of University Space Research Association (USRA), Director of the Advanced Propulsion Materials Center at AAMU, and he is the Executive Director of the State of Alabama’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Program, and also serves as a Board Member of various national and international Institutes and Centers, and as a member of various national and international committees.

ILA’s philosophy of winning through building successful partnerships has molded a large number of partnerships among which are: MOU with Univ. Sao Paulo, Brazil, Univ. of Kyoto, Japan, University of Claude Bernard, France, Univ. of Heidelberg, Germany, ITN, Portugal, Hyderabad, India; Ege Univ., Izmir, Turkey; 15 HBCUs in Alabama; over 20 HBCU/MIs outside Alabama; GTRI; ORNL, LLNL, LANL and SNL; NASA-MSFC; AMCOM/AMRDEC, ARL, and NRL; SAIC, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, EG&G, TBE, CSC, Shaw, Jacobs Engineering, II-VI/VLOC, IBM and several other industries; Japanese National Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan;  and with Max Plank Institute, Heidelberg, Germany, among a large number of others.

ILA has had extensive training in management, writing winning contracts, and effective negotiation and how to work with difficult people, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, GTRI, Harvard School of Law, and at SAIC.  ILA has also held positions as a member of National Academies’ Committee on Emerging Research Institutions, Chair of the Graduate Student Awards of the Materials Research Society, and a professor of physics. He graduated from MIT with specialty in nuclear instrumentation and nuclear structure, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts – Lowell with specialty in condensed matter physics.