Alec Broers, Baron Broers

Alec Broers, Baron Broers, born in 1938, is a British electrical engineer whose research career centred on using focused electron beams to make and examine extremely small structures. Born in Calcutta and educated in Australia and at Cambridge, he took his doctorate there in the 1960s working on ion etching inside the scanning electron microscope, then spent nearly twenty years in IBM research laboratories in the United States, where he developed long-life lanthanum hexaboride electron emitters and used electron-beam lithography to make some of the earliest sub-micron and nanometre-scale silicon and metal devices. Returning to Cambridge in 1984 as Professor of Electrical Engineering, he later headed the Engineering Department, served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1996 to 2003, and was President of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was made a crossbench life peer in 2004.