Three graduate students in electrical and computer engineering received the annual Yan Huo *94 Graduate Fellowship, supporting their research into greener power electronics, quantum cascade lasers for advanced sensing, and programmable chip-scale devices used for intelligent autonomous systems.

The 2020-2021 Fellows are:

Sara Kacmoli

Kacmoli, advised by Claire Gmachl, dynamics and instabilities in ring quantum cascade lasers both as single devices and small networks. These devices have the potential to improve existing spectroscopic and sensing systems. She also collaborates with teams that theoretically and experimentally study devices across various material platforms. Kacmoli earned a BSE degree from Smith College.

Hooman Saeidi

Saeidi, advised by Kaushik Sengupta, focuses on chip-scale systems that operate in the millimeter-wave and terahertz bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. These technologies promise to play a major role in future generations of wireless communication, especially high-resolution sensing and intelligent autonomous systems. Saeidi received a 2020 Outstanding Student Designer Award from Analog Devices; from this department, he received the 2019 Early-Stage Career Award and a 2020 Teaching Award. He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran.

Ping Wang

Wang, advised by Minjie Chen, studies high-performance power architectures for emerging telecommunications applications such as those used by big data centers. The rapid development of cloud computing, AI and 5G wireless communication has created a massive increase in demand for power consumption. Wang uses a modular approach to power architectures to create converters that can manage dynamic needs with high efficiency. His previous work on differential power processing for large-scale data storage systems won him first place prize in the 2019 IEEE ECCE Student Project Demo. Ping earned his bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.