Abbas Rastegar is Principal Member of Technical Staff and Sr. Director of Technology in Applied Materials. He is currently working on EUV mask defectivity, clean and integration. Prior to joining Applied Materials, he was a Lithography Fellow at SEMATECH Albany, USA where he was directing research in Nano Defectivity Center (NDC) and managed EUV Mask Cleaning program for 12 years. Prior to moving to industry, Dr. Rastegar was heading a research group on “Macromolecules and Liquid Crystals” in university of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He has more than 25 years of R&D experience in different physics, nano-science, and nano-technology disciplines with more than 150 published papers in technical journals and conferences.  He has Ph.D. in Physics from University of Ljubljana Slovenia in collaboration with International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste Italy. He has a diploma (M.Sc. equivalent) in Advanced Condensed Matter Theory from International Center for Theoretical Physics. Abbas received his M.Sc. in Solid State Physics and B.Sc. in Applied Physics from Ferdowsi University, Mashhad Iran.