Amir Atabaki and Danny Duong, of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were chosen for Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Thesis Awards earlier this spring. They were honored for their achievements at the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Awards Dinner on April 10.

Mr. Atabaki was chosen for the Sigma Xi Doctoral Thesis Award for his thesis entitled “Reconfigurable Silicon Photonic Devices for Optical Signal Processing.” His work focuses on the fundamental challenges for low power and ultra-fast optical signal processing devices on CMOS-compatible platforms for future interconnect and RF-photonics applications. The reconfiguration technology developed in this work enables low power, low loss, and ultra-fast reconfiguration of ultra-compact photonic devices on a single platform for the first time. Additionally, several novel devices are demonstrated in this thesis that result in orders of magnitude reduction of power consumption of nonlinear optical functionalities for practical chip-scale signal processing applications. Mr. Atabaki conducted his Ph.D. research under the direction of Ali Adibi and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Photonics Research Group.

Danny Duong received the Sigma Xi Best Master's Thesis Award for his thesis entitled “The Complex Dielectric Properties of Aqueous Ammonia from 2 GHz-8.5 GHz in Support of the NASA Juno Mission.” His work will allow the Juno Microwave Radiometer (Juno-MWR) to better measure the structure of deep atmospheric liquid clouds when the spacecraft arrives at Jupiter and begins sending back data to Earth in 2016.  Advised by Paul Steffes, Mr. Duong graduated in December 2011 with his master's degree and now works with MPR Associates, Inc. in Alexandria, Va.