Kamal Rudra receives IEEE EDS Masters Student Fellowship

As a specialist in solid-state and nanotechnology, ECE Master’s student Kamal Rudra loves what he does. And his work has recently been recognized through an IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Masters Student Fellowship. This year he is the only recipient for this highly competitive fellowship, and the first from Michigan since the fellowship’s inception in 2007.

Recipients of the award are expected to have done research in the field of electron devices. Before coming to Michigan to begin his studies in 2021, Rudra worked as an Integration and Yield Engineer at the semiconductor company GlobalFoundries, Inc., and as a researcher at the Center for Nanoscience and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, both in Bangalore, India.

He came to Michigan for two reasons: 1) Zetian Mi, whose research he had been following for several years, and 2) because of the variety of courses offered in solid-state and nanotechnology.

“The courses have been great,” said Rudra, who took four courses this past semester – which is a lot for a graduate student. He was also traveling to conferences, but that hectic semester now gives him more time to focus on research.

It’s actually not easy to get research experience as a master’s student, but Rudra worked hard to defy the odds. In his first year, he worked with Prof. Zetian Mi’s group, and gained deeper insight in the field of optoelectronic devices.

As part of Mi’s group, he worked on micro LEDs. He helped characterize the materials, and contributed to different aspects of the fabrication process in the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility. Now, he has initiated work in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and will be investigating the electronic and optical properties of newly created composite bulk materials.

“I will be working with new materials that I’ve never worked with before,” said Rudra, whose previous experience was with materials at nanoscale including thin films.

This past summer, Rudra took an internship at Meta (formerly Facebook) in Seattle, working as an Optical Engineer. He developed a deep-etch process to facilitate efficient light coupling in Photonic Integrated Circuits.

He has several publications and conference presentations, and in addition to the EDS scholarship, he received the SPIE Laser Technology, Engineering, and Applications Scholarship and J.A. Woollam Company Scholarship from SVC Foundation.

Rudra plans to graduate in 2023, and as for his future plans, he says: “As long as I’m working in this exciting field of Semiconductors and Photonics, it doesn’t matter if I’m working in industry or academia.”