Dr. Takuya Maeda received his PhD degree in March 2020 from Kyoto University, Japan. His research interests are focusing on wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductors (GaN, SiC, Ga2O3, AlN), their heterostructure with new functional materials, and their application to future electronic devices. He has experience and expertise in characterization of avalanche breakdown, Schottky/p-n junctions, and Franz-Keldysh effect in WBG semi-conductors.

Samreen Khan joined University of California Riverside in Fall 2020 as a PhD student under Dr. Richard Wilson. She received her B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani in 2020.

Fariborz Kargar obtained his BS (2006) and MS (2009) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) and K. N. Toosi University of Technology (KNTU) in Tehran, Iran, respectively. In 2013, he joined Professor Balandin’s Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials (POEM) Center as a Graduate Student Researcher. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2016. He worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Professor Balandin’s POEM Center till 2018. Presently, Dr. Kargar is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. He holds an appointment as a Project Scientist with the POEM Center. His research is focused on applications of Brillouin-Mandelstam and Raman spectroscopy to study phonons and magnons in advanced materials. Other areas of his expertise include thermal transport; charge-density-wave materials and devices; design and synthesis of composites with graphene and novel quasi-1D materials for applications in thermal management and electromagnetic interference shielding. He serves as an Editorial Board member for the Journal of Composites Science and Polymers.

Chen Yang received his M.S. degree in Material Physics & Chemistry in 2018 and B.S degree in Material Physics in 2015 from Fudan University, China. His previous work focused on electronic materials and chip package reliability. He joined our research group in Aug 2018 and completed a Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering at ASU.

Kai Fu is an Assistant Research Scientist in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering (ECEE) at Arizona State University. He received his B.S. degree in 2008 from Ocean University of China and his Ph.D. degree in 2013 from Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics (SINANO), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). His research interests are in the area of wide bandgap and ultra wide bandgap materials and devices, including the epitaxial growth, design, and fabrication of semiconductor electronic and photoelectronic devices.

Joy Acharjee received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Bangladesh in 2016 and M.S. from Texas Tech University in 2019. His primary research focus includes modeling and simulation of nanoscale semiconductor devices using Monte Carlo methods. For the ULTRA team, he is working on the characterization of ultra-wide bandgap materials like III-V nitrides-based power devices. 

Ky merrill received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale in 2010 and 2012, respectively. He received a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 2020. His research has focused on the realization of atomistic simulation methods and the application of Monte Carlo methods to the modeling, design, and optimization of both charge and heat transport in electron devices. His current research interests are focused in the electrothermal characterization of novel power devices realized with wide bandgap and ultra-wide bandgap materials such as diamond and nitride-based materials. A particular emphasis of Dr. Merrill's work is in the optimizaiton of the device layout aiming to 1) the improvement of reliability and performance through the mitigation and/or management of detrimental thermal effects, and 2) the study of the importance of thermal effects in high-frequency operation.

Cody Milne is a first year PhD student at Arizona State University. He graduated from Idaho State with a BS in Physics, minor in math, where he also spent time working toward a MS before coming to Arizona State. His past research experience includes detector design and other work in experimental neutrino physics. Now he is eager to start doing research in solid state physics. He is specifically interested in the quantum behavior of solids at extreme conditions.  

Dr. Tathagata Biswas is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University. Dr. Biswas completed his PhD from the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science. His PhD work involved the study of electronic and optical properties of oxides and defects in oxides using various ab-initio methods. Dr. Biswas joined the ULTRA team to work on high=throughput modeling of interfaces and defects using ab-initio methods such as GW-BSE formalism.