Jahnavi Sharma and Xinwen Yao Selected for MIT's Rising Stars Workshop

November 19, 2016

Two current electrical engineering PhD students, Jahnavi Sharma and Xinwen Yao, were selected for the 2016 Rising Stars in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Workshop. Hosted at Carnegie Mellon University campus in collaboration with MIT’s EECS department on the weekend of October 30th, the workshop gathers the world’s most promising women Ph. D student, postdocs, and engineers/scientists.

Jahnavi Sharma is a doctoral student working with Professor Harish Krishnaswamy. Her research interests include developing integrated circuit solutions for emerging applications, pushing performance through both system- and block- level innovation in CMOS and compound semiconductors. This also encompasses specific interests in high- to sub-mmWave circuit design, device modeling for high frequency design, and mixed-signal circuit techniques. Her doctoral work focuses on signal generation for RF-to-THz applications, and she was the recipient of the 2015-16 IBM PhD Fellowship Award. She has also held internship positions at IBM in 2014 where she worked on new low-loss bipolar switch topologies for widely-tunable mm-Wave oscillators in Silicon-Germanium, and at Alcatel-Lucent in 2013 and 2015 where she worked on designing inexpensive hybrid RF-mmWave modules for LTE fronthaul to improve network accessibility and higher data rates without expensive fiber-based backhaul. Prior to her PhD, Jahnavi graduated with a bachelor's and master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2009.

Xinwen Yao is a PhD candidate in the structure function imaging laboratory advised by Professor Christine Hendon. Her research focuses on design and implementation of ultrahigh resolution spectral domain (SD) optical coherence tomography (OCT) and its functional extension for imaging myocardium and breast tissue. She received her B.S degree from Xiamen University in China with Graduate of Excellence award, and M.S. degree in Columbia University. She received best poster award at 7th biophotonics international graduate summer school in 2015 for the work of “Ultrahigh resolution SD OCT for myocardial imaging” and was a student poster award winner at OSA biomedical optics congress in 2016 for the work of “Towards in vivo high resolution OCT based ductal imaging”.