I am from Texas, a small town called Castroville, just outside of San Antonio. I am from a pretty rural environment and I spent a good amount of time outside, exploring.

As well as exploring the outdoors I read a lot of books, played a lot of video games. I quite liked sports, I was very into running.

I think I always wanted to be involved in science. As a kid I was especially interested in astronomy. I watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and I read a lot of his books. When I got to college I took Astronomy 101, I saw all of the radio telescope data and all of the data analysis required and decided that was something I didn’t want to do. I wanted to do something with my hands, something more tangible. All science is pretty fiddly, but I wanted to connect more with my research.

I like to spend time outside. My fiancé and I have been getting into bird watching recently. I get to use my science brain, look up facts about them, we can get some great pictures and it is a great way to be outdoors and just take in nature at a different pace.

I work in photonics, which is at the kind of weird intersection between applied physics and electrical engineering. As an undergraduate I did a series of stints in different research labs exploring different options. I was in a chemistry lab working on the synthesis of nanoparticles and was thinking about how I was interested in materials science adjacent stuff, but I didn’t really know what specifically. I spent some more time in a condensed matter lab and found myself very interested in exploring the crystal growth of materials. A graduate student in that, who was my mentor, talked to me about why she was interested in this kind of research and how important it was. She also talked with me about my interests and to think about when you are doing science and how to decide on directions in research. She helped me shape some of my ideas, which got me thinking about a more applications focused path.

I took a year out between undergraduate and graduate school and spent a year working at a place doing semiconductor nanofabrication. I didn’t know that this was a thing you could do until I spent time there. Doing this work made me really interested in studying whether we could use fabrication tools to make artificial materials instead of just relying on natural growth patterns.

When I was looking at graduate schools I read up on Arka’s research and thought it was interesting opportunity at the intersection of semiconductor fabrication and light – matter interaction.

I am still very early on in my career, but I would say to anyone who is interested and in college or starting graduate school, that they will be surprised by how many different scientific opportunities there are out there. I didn’t really know about all the possibilities, so you have to keep an open mind and be willing to try new things. This has been one of the great things about being engaged with the IMOD community. I can talk to lots of people from different disciplines and we can brainstorm together. I have not even heard of half the stuff people are doing, and it is really exciting when we can find ways to make new things connect and relate to each other. It is great to uncover new ways to help each other.

It also has been great in learning more. I learn lingo from other disciplines. I was surprised at how challenging it was at first to work with people in different disciplines, but it can be so rewarding once you get on the same page. Projects really start to gel once you understand each other.

It was a surprise to me, but one of the hardest things has been communication and coordination of projects. Once you start getting involved in a number of large collaborations, just keeping everything straight and maintaining strong lines of communication takes work!

Photonics is becoming an increasingly relevant field, especially in conjunction with more traditional semiconductor technologies. There is a sort of limit on the materials platforms that you can use for photonics, and it is interesting to modify these kind of integrated circuits, introduce new modalities and find ways to enhance features of these devices.

These systems would let us build on chip lasers and detectors. These devices could be used in a range of next generation and quantum computing applications.

Using these as building blocks could reduce the energy consumption of computing, which would be of huge benefit, think about how much energy is fueling the current AI wave. That is only going to increase demand. Things like optical computing and optical-based neural networks could really change things.