Leadership
Thomas R Shrout- Founder
He founded TRS Ceramics in 1991. He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Materials Science (out of 214 Worldwide), 2003. Was mentioned in “25 Winning Technologies,” 5th Annual Technology and Innovation Awards, Industry Week, p. 58, December 15, 1997. His work includes Structural Properties in Dielectric and Piezoelectric Ceramics as well as Domain Engineered Single Crystal Relaxor-PT Ferroelectrics.
Wesley Hackenberger – President
He is a successful corporate leader with over 20 years of experience in the piezoceramic industry, all of which have been with TRS Technologies. During the past fourteen years as the company president, Wes has been instrumental in the company’s advancement in single crystal development, piezoceramic high density manufacturing as well as our entry into piezo and single crystal composites. Wes has written numerous papers on piezoceramics and single crystals focusing on everything from fine grain ceramics to high density materials. He graduated from Penn State University in 1995 with a PhD in Materials. Wes earned a BS in Nuclear Engineering from Penn State.
Stuart Blacker – CFO
Stuart has over 30 years of financial and business management to include working for Chase, Citibank, Wachovia, and Costco. He is the founder and former owner of Blatek, Inc, where his company focused on developing piezoceramic composites to include 2-2 and 1-3 composite orientations. Stuart holds an MBA.
Jun Luo – Chief Scientist
He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science from Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2000. He held a position of associate professor in the same institute till the summer of 2001, where he conducted research on crystal growth and characterization of nonlinear optical crystals, such as YCOB and GdCOB. From 2001 to 2002 he worked at Lightwaves 2020, Inc, which located at San Jose, California, as a R&D Engineer and developed new magneto-optical materials by liquid phase epitaxy (LPE) technique for Faraday rotator application. From 2002 to 2004 he worked at University of Central Florida as a Research Associate. During this period, he focused on Czochralski growth of langasite and its isomorphs for high-precision bulk and surface acoustic waves (BAW & SAW) devices. He joined in TRS at 2004, and since then he has been leading (principle investigator) 1 Phase III, 5 Phase II and 3 Phase I SBIR or STTR projects, through which, a series of relaxor-PT single crystals have been developed to meet the challenges of new generation of transducer, actuator and sensor applications. He made major contributions on commercialization of these crystals at TRS, including TRSX2B, TRSX4B, TRSX4B-HQ. Dr. Luo is the author and co-author of 3 book chapters and over 40 technical papers published in peer-reviewed journals. He has 3 published patents and few pending ones. He also gave numerous presentations (including 5 invited ones) on academic conferences.