The Singh Center for Nanotechnology announces new class of Graduate Student Fellows
Singh Center for Nanotechnology Graduate Student Fellows
A total of 10 master students at Penn engineering have been chosen as Graduate Student Fellows (GSF). Conceived in 2015 by Noah Clay, Staff Director of the Quattrone Nanofabrication Facility (QNF), the GSF program is a highly-regarded and competitive program that provides Penn masters students with nanofabrication experience in a world class cleanroom. The GSFs will develop hands-on skills in fabricating devices, establishing fundamental and advanced level processes, and developing and participating in educational components for lab courses and workshops.
“We want the GSFs to have hands-on nanofabrication experiences which cannot be obtained by textbook”, Gyuseok Kim, GSF program coordinator, mentioned. For a year, each student makes their own device, such as multichannel biosensors, transducers for cochlear implants, nanopore membranes, MEMS devices, 2D graphene sensors, and quantum dot devices. Projects are collaborations with Penn faculty as well as faculty from other institutions, such as Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and UFPR in Brazil. While GSFs develop their device, they will also learn how materials and tools are used in the processes, and how to troubleshoot.
“Another purpose of this program is to share our knowledge to the world”, Gyuseok added. As a member of National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), QNF has shared the protocol and tool data since 2015 through Scholarly Commons (https://repository.upenn.edu/qnf/). QNF documents have been downloaded more than 43,000 times over past 3 years all over the world. In the last year alone, more than 27,000 downloads were recorded, all produced through the GSF program.
As a team, GSFs are building a community to share the nanofabrication experience through weekly meetings to discuss and share progress on their devices and processes. Each GSF presents to the team every third week, giving them the opportunity to practice public speaking and professional development.
Since 2015, the GSF program at QNF has become an integral and vital element of the continuing goal of service to the University of Pennsylvania as well as to the wider academic and business communities.
The GSF awardees
- Francisco Saldana Fernandez (Nanotechnology Masters)
- Akshaya Venkatakrishnan (Nanotechnology Masters)
- Hannah Hastings (Nanotechnology Masters)
- Mengwei Liu (Material Science and Engineering)
- Meiyue Zhang (Material Science and Engineering)
- Hang Qian (Material Science and Engineering)
- Ningzhi Xie (Material Science and Engineering)
- Erin Puzo (Electrical Engineering)
- Jeff Wu (Electrical Engineering)
- Unnati Joshi (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
