David Lishan received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from UC Santa Cruz and Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in Solid State Electrical Engineering. He has worked and published on a wide range of material, semiconductor, and chemistry R&D projects in the areas of lithography, photochemistry, x-ray mask fabrication, PVD, and plasma processing. During his 15 years at Plasma-Therm, he has had business unit management and worldwide marketing responsibilities. Currently he is in the roles of Principal Scientist and Director in the Technical Marketing Group. His primary focus is on the application of plasma processing for R&D, MEMS, photonics, data storage, power, and compound semiconductor applications. He holds two patents in the area of semiconductor processing and has over 60 publications and conference presentations.

With Plasma-Therm, he has organized and presented plasma processing workshops at leading institutions throughout the world, including Harvard University, UC Berkeley, University of Notre Dame, UC Los Angeles (UCLA), University of South Florida, Stanford University, Lund University (Sweden), IMRE (Singapore), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), ISCAS (Beijing, China), SINANO (Suzhou, China), UT Austin, Cornell University, Pennyslvania State University, KANC (S. Korea), University of Alberta, and in Israel.