Sean Rodrigues has been named the recipient of the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi M.S. Thesis Award, which will be presented at the annual Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Awards Banquet on April 21.

Rodrigues is currently a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai was his master’s thesis advisor and now serves as his Ph.D. advisor.

Rodrigues will be recognized for his M.S. thesis entitled “Enhancing Chiroptical Signals from Metamaterials via Nonlinear Excitation.” His groundbreaking research on metamaterials has led to two first-authored papers in Advanced Materials, several co-authored papers in journals like Nature Materials and Nature Communications, and two first-authored essays/reviews in Science and Nature Nanotechnology.

Rodrigues graduated with his M.S. degree in December 2015, and his research interests are focused on metamaterials, plasmonics, nonlinear optics, photonics, and microsystems. Rodrigues was also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow Program awardee and a Goizueta GoSTEM Fellow, and in January, he received an Intel scholarship at the annual FOCUS President’s Dinner, which was part of diversity activities hosted over the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend.