KNI Ambassadors
In January 2024 we launched the KNI Ambassadors program, where a group of faculty-nominated graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and researchers of the KNI Lab serve as leaders and liaisons for our community. In collaboration with KNI staff, the aim is that the Ambassadors will help create and steward new pathways for meaningful technical, scientific, and educational support. Meet the 2024 KNI Ambassadors cohort:
Anthony Ardizzi is a Research Engineer in Austin Minnich's group. Anthony's current research focus is on precision nanofabrication techniques for quantum device manufacturing. At present, he is working on atomic layer processing of III-V semiconductors, for the purpose of fabricating ultra low-noise HEMT amplifiers with improved noise performance, using the KNI cleanroom facilities. Such devices find widespread application in both quantum computing and radio astronomy. Anthony is also part of the Caltech Radio Astronomy Lab (CRAL) where we perform device characterization at microwave frequencies.
Email: aardizzi[at]caltech[dot]edu
Wenyuan (Wen) Chen is an Electrical Engineering graduate student in Julia R. Greer's group who joined Caltech in 2020. Previously, he graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. His current research focuses on developing two-photon lithography processes for optical metamaterials.
Email: wchen5[at]caltech[dot]edu
Changsoon Choi is an Electrical Engineering graduate student in Axel Scherer's group, focusing on the fabrication of electrochemical sensors with nanopores. His research aims to enhance the sensitivity and throughput of nanopore sensors. He holds both a master's and bachelor's degree in physics from Korea University.
Email: cchoi[at]caltech[dot]edu
Yiran Suki Gu is a Materials Science graduate student in Andrei Faraon's group. Her research is centered on electro-optically reconfigurable metasurfaces and volumetric meta-optics. Diverging from traditional lenses, metasurfaces are crafted through artificially designed and fabricated structural units to achieve the desired properties and functionalities. Building upon many previous works, the Faraon group has integrated active organics with dielectric metasurfaces to demonstrate intensity/phase modulations of NIR light. Moreover, realizing that multi-layer structures can bring additional degrees of freedom, they investigate suitable optical resonances and new material/fabrication platforms.
Email: ygu2[at]caltech[dot]edu
Claudio Hail is a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech's Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science under the guidance of Prof. Harry A. Atwater. Claudio's research centers around highly resonant dielectric optical nanostructures and optomechanics. Prior to joining Caltech, he earned his PhD at ETH Zurich in 2020 in the group of Prof. Dimos Poulikakos, where he developed a technique for the on-demand nanoprinting of single fluorescent molecules and optical materials for structural coloring.
Email: chail[at]caltech[dot]edu
Duxing Hao is a Physics graduate student in Nai-Chang Yeh's group. Duxing has been a member of the KNI Lab since 2020. His current research focuses on transition metal dichalcogenide field effect transistors and cryogenic photocurrent spectroscopy with twisted light.
Email: dhao[at]caltech[dot]edu
Mark Lohmann is a Nanofabrication Engineer in the research group of Prof. Michael L. Roukes. Mark works with a team of highly-skilled engineers to design and fabricate the nanodevices for the single-cell proteomics research effort as well as the other exciting projects underway in the Roukes Group. Before Caltech, he was an American Society for Engineering Education postdoctoral fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory under the advisement of Dr. Connie Li. Mark earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Riverside in 2020 under the advisement of Prof. Jing Shi. His research focused on the interplay of spin and charge in two-dimensional material heterostructures.
Email: mlohmann[at]caltech[dot]edu
Kevin Nakahara is a Mechanical Engineering graduate student in Julia R. Greer's group. His work centers around characterizing the mechanical properties of nanoarchitected composites from quasi-static to dynamic strain rates. The work utilizes a novel interference lithography technique enabled by metasurface masks to create nanoarchitected structures with macroscopic global dimensions (cm) and feature sizes in the hundreds of nm. These structures are then laid up into composites and mechanically tested.
Email: knakahar[at]caltech[dot]edu