John A. Woollam

John Woollam was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His interest in physics, engineering, and business was stimulated by his father, Arthur E. Woollam, who ran a water pump company in Kalamazoo. As a teenager John was not interested very much in school classes, but he spent hours at his father's company studying and building pumps. This attitude changed when he attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he majored in physics. He earned his master's degree in 1963 and defended a Ph.D. in 1967 at the Michigan State University. For 13 years after that, he was employed by NASA to work in cryophysics, superconductivity, and propulsion systems. While working at NASA, he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Case Institute of Technology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1978.

In 1979, John Woollam became a professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, taking over the laboratory and research group of retiring professor Nick Bashara, where he has researched the optical, electrical, and microstructural properties of solids and thin films as well as interfacial and environmental effects on materials. Trained as a solid-state experimental physicist, Woollam’s initial interest was in low-temperature physics, superconductors, and related materials; however, in the 1980s he began to study Raman spectroscopy and the optical characterization of surfaces and films of technological importance. More recently, he has focused primarily on studying the development and application of ellipsometry to a wide range of materials, industrial, and biological problems. Woollam and his group have contributed all over the world to the design, manufacture, and application of ellipsometric instruments at academic and corporate research/production facilities.