Winners of the 2015 Kraus Graduate Student Poster Competition announced

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering alumni judges had their work cut out for them. A total 15 student entries filled the lobby inside the ElectroScience Lab Thursday evening for the 2015 John D. and Alice Nelson Kraus Memorial Graduate Student Poster Competition.

In the end, however, they selected Edwin Lee the winner and recipient of $500 for his poster "2D Layered MoS2 and 2D/3D Junctions." His ECE advisor is Dr. Siddharth Rajan.

Lee's abstract explains, "Molydbenum disulfide (MoS2) is a two-dimensional (2D), layered semiconductor that has gained significant interest due to several of its interesting properties. Many reports have demonstrated transistors, photodetectors and flexible and transparant electronics with MoS2 flakes that were mechanically exfoliated from geological samples. These flakes are small, and as a response to the scalability issue that device fabrication on micron-size flakes highlights, we have developed a deposition technique that results in large-area, high-quality MoS2. We have increased the conductivity in our films by doping them with niobium. Using direct growth and film transfer methods, we have studied junctions formed by MoS2 and wide band gap semiconductors like SiC and GaN. We characterized the diodes formed by these junctions using electrical and optical measurements."

Second place and $300 went to Satheesh Bojja Venkatakirishnan for his poster, "UWB digital beamformer realization employing a novel on-site coding using FPGAs." His ECE advisor is Dr. Elias Alwan. 

Taking home third place and $100 is Andrew Kintz for his poster, "A new approach to resolving emitter locations in the presence of antenna manifold mismatch." His advisor is ECE's Dr. Inder Gupta.

In a new twist this year, the poster competition was held in conjunction with the ECE Alumni Meetup event. Alumni served as judges for the competition, learning about new research at the department, as well as getting a chance to network and socialize with the graduate students.

ECE alumnus Dave DuScheid, process control engineer manager at PPG Industries, said he enjoys interacting with the graduate students. It enables him to stay abreast of new technology.

"I decided to join the ECE Meetup group because there is a lot of technology out there, and as an end user, we see very little about what is going on in technology in the future," he said. "This gives us an opportunity to see what's on the forefront and what's being developed so that we will be able to realize this in the future." 

Find photographs from the whole event HERE.