Four Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) doctoral candidates received the Department of Defense’s National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship.
Emily Marshall, William Pavlick, David West, and Joshua Wong are the latest ECE students to receive the prestigious honor.
They join Brett Ringel who was awarded the fellowship in 2023.
The NDSEG Fellowship Program is a competitive three-year fellowship that encourages promising U.S. scientists to pursue doctoral degrees, furthering their respective research interests. This year’s awardees have a wide array of research interests including nanophonics, electromagnetic metasurfaces, and more.
Emily Marshall
Advised by ECE Professor William Doolittle, Marshall’s work takes an "atoms to electronics" approach to improving molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)-grown scandium aluminum nitride (ScAlN)-based devices. Through the NDSEG Fellowship, she’ll explore and optimize ScAlN growth conditions and then build upon these optimizations to create novel ScAlN-based transistors. High-quality ScAlN has the potential to be used in high-power, high-frequency, and high-efficiency radio frequency (RF) and power devices, even in extreme environments.
“I am so honored to have received an NDSEG fellowship, and I am excited for the incredible possibilities it unlocks for my research,” she said. “It will provide me with greater autonomy to explore my interests all while advancing science and technology to help our country and our world.”
William Pavlick
Pavlick’s research is focused on developing magnetically reconfigured, conformal metasurfaces. Traditional reconfigurable metasurfaces, and antennas, are controlled electronically, requiring complex biasing circuitry, and enforcing constraints on the geometry of the device. By substituting magnetic, mechanical reconfiguration for electronic reconfiguration, these problems dissolve and devices instead depend on the compatibility between electromagnetics and mechanical systems.
He is advised by ECE assistant professor Nima Ghalichechian.
“With the NDSEG Fellowship, I have the opportunity to continue to develop these metasurfaces in the pursuit of generating electromagnetic illusions on a variety of surface geometries,” he said.
David West
West’s proposed research concerns the use of vanadium dioxide (VO2) for low-loss reconfigurable metasurfaces at the millimeter wave (mmWave) band. Conventional switching technologies experience high parasitic losses in the mmWave band and have limited power handling capabilities, which impacts performance for key defense systems. VO2 is a phase-change material with a sharp, rapid transition between insulating and conducting states at 68°C, which enables its use for low-loss switching and power-limiting applications with high peak power handling.
He is advised by ECE assistant professor Nima Ghalichechian.
Joshua Wong
Wong works on integrated nanophononics for space applications that are robust to radiation and harsh environments. His research aims to pave the way to higher bandwidth for telecommunication systems in space, but also to scale down the size of the systems to save on area, weight, power, and cost of the deployed devices. The ultimate goal would be to provide internet for everyone anywhere in the world.
ECE Professor Stephen Ralph is Wong’s advisor.
“It is an incredible privilege to have been awarded this fellowship, and I'm very grateful to my advisor, friends, and lab mates who helped me get this far,” he said. “I hope I can use this funding to conduct good research and really help the world out!”
Brett Ringel (2023 Recipient)
Ringel’s NDSEG work involves designing silicon-germanium bipolar complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor radio frequency and photonic integrated circuits for reliability in space environment through radiation hardening by design. Furthermore, he designs microwave photonic circuits as alternatives to conventional RFIC designs.
He is advised by ECE Regents Professor John Cressler.
“I cannot overstatement my appreciation for everyone who helped and supported me along the way,” he said. “I specifically would like to thank my advisor Dr. Cressler for his support and guidance as well as my fellow lab mate Sanghoon Lee for his help and friendship during the application process.”
Learn more about the NDSEG Fellowship here.