Sep 2017 – Jul 2023 · 5 yrs 10 mos · Greater Boston Area

Jan 2017 – May 2017 · 4 mos · Amherst, MA

• Teaching assistant and grader for Physics 120: From Big Bang to Black Holes, an introductory class on Special and General Relativity, and Cosmology, aimed at non-STEM majors. The course is a writing-focused course that encourages critical, precise thought, and the articulation of the scientific ideas learned in class.
• Responsibilities included:
• 1. Grading weekly assignments: Each assignment was graded by a TA, and reviewed by another TA to increase grading consistency. Each grading cycle typically lasts from Thursday morning to Sunday night. Each TA looked at 12-13 assignments as primary (grading, providing feedback), and 12-13 assignments as secondary (checking potential inconsistencies in fellow TA's grading, providing any extra feedback, if applicable).
• 2. Weekly TA meetings: Weekly meetings were held to finalize the specifics of the grading rubric, and come to consensus on grading criteria. Each week's meeting was conducted by one TA in the team, with each TA conducting 2-3 meetings over the course of the semester.
• 3. Help sessions: Attended occasional help sessions that were organized on a need-of-students basis. Clarified mathematical procedures and ideas for students, as well as helped students articulate the more nuanced points of their arguments for their papers.

Sep 2014 – May 2017 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Amherst, MA

• Responsible for the synthesis of titanium and strontium perovskites, the reduction of said perovskites, and analysis (EPR and diffuse reflectance) of produced samples.
• Responsible for instructing incoming undergraduates in methods used in bulk material synthesis, reduction, and analysis.
• Low-cost perovskites are an integral part of future applications in photocatalysis. However, strontium perovskites are active in the UV region, and not in the visible light region. We attempt to synthesize and characterize different Ruddelsden-Popper phases of strontium perovskites, both undoped, and doped with chromium, nickel, iron, and other transition metals. These transition metals allow for alteration of the band structure of the perovskite to enable photocatalytic activity in the visible light region.
• Work in the project involves synthesis of perovskite powders in tightly-controlled scales, times, and temperatures, as well as reduction using NaBH4, varying the molar ratio over a wide range to gain insight into the nature of the reduction. The reduced perovskites show oxygen vacancies at different regions of the lattice, and one of the important aims of characterization is to control the location of these oxygen vacancies, which in turn affect photocatalytic activity.

May 2016 – Jul 2016 · 2 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

• Responsible for the simulation of waveguide modes, sweeping waveguide geometric parameters to find optimal dimensions for different objectives, and design of optical components using IPKISS.
• Integrated photonics deals with the fabrication, characterization, and use of photonic components such as ring resonators, interferometers, modulators, among others, on a single (usually silicon) wafer.
• As a summer intern, I assisted multiple projects with critical support tasks such as data acquisition, analysis, plotting, instrument control, and raw fresh-from-instrument data analysis (multiple peak-finding, characterization, fitting, in one dataset).
• Python is used to automate waveguide dimension sweeps, as well as tabulation, analysis and plotting of all data regarding an array of parameters like intermodal dispersion, effective refractive index, and TE fraction.
• Responsible for generation of photonic device layouts for printing into GDSII files. IPKISS was used to generate the layout.
• Proposed, simulated and experimentally verified high-transmittance waveguide tapers, achieving 95%+ efficiency consistently for taper lengths far less than previously reported.
• Optimized MMI couplers for mid-IR band, achieving 92% peak transmission efficiency using basin hopping, BFGS, Powell minimization, implemented using proprietary, as well as Scipy implementations.