Paul Sides

Paul Sides is an emeritus professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Born and reared in Birmingham, Alabama, he received his B.S.Ch.E. from the University of Utah in 1973 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. He joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon in 1981. He is a member of the Electrochemical Society, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

He has published more than 70 articles in three primary research areas: electrochemical engineering, growth of advanced materials, and colloid science. In the first, he has done basic research on electrolytic gas evolution, transport phenomena and kinetics of aluminum reduction, corrosion of magnetic materials for high density recording, and optical sensing of electrochemical current density. In the materials area, he has worked on growth and characterization of CdTe and CdZnTe by Metalorganic Chemical Vapor Deposition. He has also investigated growth of diamondlike carbon by Plasma Activated Chemical Vapor Deposition. In the area of colloids, he has investigated the directed assembly of colloidal particles and the determination of zeta potential.

He has one patent issued on an optical method for fly height measurement for disk drives and one patent issued on a zeta potential measurement technique invented with NSF support. Currently he conducts research on electrohydrodynamic flows, measurement of zeta potential, stability of dispersion in non polar media, and high throughput electrocatalysis research. He founded a company, ZetaMetrix Inc, in 2006 to make and market the zeta potential instrument that has been sold to, among others, PPG, Clarkson University, Virginia Tech, and NIST. Sides received a Fulbright Fellowship to lecture in the USSR in 1989 and spent six months sabbatical leave at HITACHI Central Research Laboratory in 1990.