The Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech has announced the winners for the 2014-15 Fall Seed Grant Awards. The IEN Seed Grant’s primary purpose is to give first or second year graduate students in various disciplines working on original and un-funded research in micro- and nano-scale projects the opportunity to access the most advanced academic cleanroom space in the Southeast. In addition to accessing the high-level fabrication, lithography, and characterization tools in the labs, the students will have a chance to learn cleanroom and tool methodology and to consult with the research staff of the IEN Advanced Technology Team. The Seed Grant program’s secondary purpose is to give faculty with novel research topics the ability to develop preliminary data in order to pursue follow-up funding sources.

This competition is offered biannually, in the spring and fall.  The 4 student winners for this award cycle come from various schools across campus, and will be provided no-cost access to the IEN cleanrooms and labs. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include MEMS, electronics, batteries, and optoelectronics research.

The Fall 2014-2015 IEN Seed Grant Award winners are:

• Serife Tol (PI Alper Erturk, Mechanical Engineering), Bistable Snap-through MEMS Systems for Ultra-broadband Nonlinear Energy Harvesting from Elastoacoustic Wave

• Xinyi Gong (PIs Erik Shipton, Raj Pulugurtha, and Rao Tummala, GTRI, Packaging Research Center, and Electrical and Computer Engineering), Magnetic Nanoarrays for Ultra-miniaturized Micro- and mm-wave Structure
• Zhipeng Pan (PI Shuman Xia, Mechanical Engineering), Nanofabrication of Lithuim-Ion Battery Electrodes with Embedded Multiphysics Sensors
• Jun Chen (PI ZL Wang, Materials Science and Engineering), Piezo-phototronic Vertical Nanowire-LEDs Array for Reconfigurabel/Tunable Optoelectronics

Awardees will present their results of their research efforts at the annual IEN User Day in 2015.