Adam Heller

Adam Heller
President George W. Bush presents the 2007 National Medal for Technology and Innovation to Dr. Adam Heller of the University of Texas at Austin at a ceremony in September 2008.
Born	(1933-06-25) June 25, 1933 (age 83) Cluj, Transylvania, Romania
Residence	Texas, United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Chemical Engineering
Institutions	Bell Laboratories GTE Laboratories University of Texas at Austin
Alma mater	Hebrew University
Doctoral advisor	Ernst David Bergmann

Adam Heller (born June 25, 1933) is an Israeli-American engineer and Research Professor of the John J. McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He formerly held the Ernest Cockrell Sr. Chair in Engineering of the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas. As of 2016, he was granted 271 U.S. patents with 392 patent applications pending. He consults to Abbott Diabetes Care, Inc. of Alameda, California, the maker of the Freestyle line of products. He also serves as Chief Scientific Officer of Synagile Corporation, a venture developing continuous oral drug-infusion systems, particularly for managing advanced Parkinson's disease.

Adam Heller was born in 1933 to Jewish parents in the Romanian city of Cluj (now Cluj-Napoca). In 1944, following the Second Vienna Award, the Hungarian administration confiscated his family's property, and they were forcibly relocated along with more than 18,000 other Jews to the Kolozsvár Ghetto within the walls of the Iris Brickyard. In late May of the same year, the prisoners of the ghetto at Kolozsvár were transported out of the ghetto as part of the Nazi Final Solution. Heller and his immediate family survived on Kastner's train. In 1945, he arrived in British Mandate Palestine, which became the State of Israel in 1948.

Heller received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Hebrew University in 1961, where he studied under Ernst David Bergmann. After post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley (1962–1963) and at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey (1963–1964), he worked at GTE Laboratories in Bayside, New York and in Waltham, Massachusetts (1964–1975), then returned to Bell Laboratories (1975–1988), heading its Electronic Materials Research Department (1977–1988). Under his stewardship, a team led by King L. Tai, developed key parts of the high speed, high density chip-to-chip interconnect technology of mobile electronic systems.