Two Electrical Engineering students, Jahnavi Sharma and Kevin Tien, have been awarded the IBM PhD fellowship award for 2015-16. This PhD fellowship is a highly competitive worldwide program awarded annually by IBM, and encourages research leading to fundamental innovations in an array of focus areas of interest to IBM.
Jahnavi Sharma is a student in the CoSMIC lab advised by Prof. Harish Krishnaswamy who is doing research on developing high-power, sub-mm-wave signal sources. The 300 GHz - 3 THz frequency range, known as the THz gap, has been beyond the scope of conventional electronics and optics. Applications for systems in this frequency range include imaging, spectroscopy and very-high-data-rate short-distance communication. The emphasis of her work is on developing novel circuit techniques for operation beyond transistor cut-off in cost-effective and highly integrated silicon technologies.
Kevin Tien, who is working towards his doctoral degree under the supervision of Prof. Ken Shepard, spent several months at IBM Watson in Yorktown Heights where he was involved in research involving advanced on-chip inductor fabrication and how to best leverage these new devices in power supply circuits and systems for server applications. He received a B.Eng in electrical engineering from Cooper Union in 2012, and received his M.Sc from Columbia in 2013.