Avani is a master's student in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. She is working under Dr. Robert Nemanich's NSL group. She completed her Bachelor Integrated Master's degree from the Department of Physics at the National Institute of Technology, Surat, India. She has the experience to grow and characterize single-crystal diamonds using 2.45 GHz and 915 MHz CVD machines in India. She has joined the ULTRA team to work on synthesis and nucleation of c-BN film on Diamond substrate using ECR CVD method and characterization of BN/Diamond interface using XPS/UPS.
Ramandeep is a doctoral candidate in the Materials Science and Engineering program at Arizona State University. She earned her Master's degree in Metallurgical Engineering with a specialization in Physical Metallurgy from RWTH-Aachen in Germany, and her undergraduate degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Banaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU) in India. After her undergrad studies, she also worked for five years as an Engineer in the research and development unit of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, a power plant equipment manufacturing company in India.
Her current research is focused on the characterization of structure and chemistry of epilayers and interfaces in ultrawide-bandgap material-based heterostructures to understand the synthesis-structure-property relationships. In her research, she uses various characterization techniques including high-resolution (scanning) transmission electron microscopy (HR-(S)TEM), electron-energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX).
Saurabh Vishwakarma is a doctoral candidate in Materials Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. His Ph.D. research focuses on structural and chemical characterization of wide and ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors using TEM/STEM techniques. He completed his Bachelor's degree in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2017.
Ziyi He received his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University in 2021 and B.S. degree in Huazhong University of Science and technology in 2020. He joined ULTRA in 2021 and works on the MOCVD growth of ultra-wide bandgap materials and related devices.
Yongjie obtained his Ph.D. from Arizona State University for his work on multiscale modeling for 3-terminal GaPNAs/Si tandem solar cells. After that, he worked as a postdoc supervised by Dr. Stephen Goodnick at ASU on indoor photovoltaics and on nonequilibrium phonon effects on hot carriers. He recently joined Dr. Marco Saraniti as a postdoc. For ULTRA, he will work on thermal and electrical transport using the Monte Carlo method. He is generally interested in predictive methods for energy related topics.
Erick Guzman joined the University of California Riverside in Fall
2020 as an Electrical engineering PhD student under Dr. Alexander Balandin. He received his B.S. (2017) and M.S. (2020) in Physics from the California State University Northridge, and is currently an affiliate researcher at the University of California Los Angeles. His research is focused on studying the optical and acoustic phonons in UWBG materials using Raman and Brillouin spectroscopy.
Xiang Zheng is a research associate in Center for Device Thermography and Reliability (CDTR) at the University of Bristol. He got a PhD degree from Beijing University of Technology in 2020. His PhD research included the trapping effect in GaN-based HEMTs and the temperature measurement of wide bandgap semiconductors. His current research interests are the transport and thermal management of ultra-wide bandgap electronic materials and devices. Xiang received the China National Scholarship for PhD students in 2016 and 2018. He has published over ten papers about the reliability issues of GaN-based HEMTs.