The International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS) has awarded its 2016 Young Scientist Award to Srabanti Chowdhury, an associate professor in UC Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Among the department’s newest faculty members, Chowdhury previously held an assistant professor position at Arizona State University’s School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering.

Chowdhury earned her master’s degree (2008) and doctorate (2010) in electrical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. As part of her PhD work, she developed gallium nitride (GaN)-based vertical devices for power conversion, and demonstrated the first vertical GaN high voltage power-switching device — a current aperture vertical electron transistor (CAVET) — with a record-high breakdown electric field. In 2015 she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, and a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award. Another one of her projects involves collaboration with PowerAmerica, a U.S. Department of Energy organization based at North Carolina State University with the goal of enhanced energy efficiency by making wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductor technologies cost-competitive with the currently used silicon-based power electronics.

More info: engineering.ucdavis.edu/blog/srabanti-chowdhury-wins-youn...