BIOGRAPHY
A life-long resident of California, I received my B.S. in physics at UC Santa Barbara in 2005 before heading east to Cornell for graduate school. There, I joined professor Keith Schwab’s research group just as he was starting his lab at Cornell, where I first worked to set-up a low-temperature laboratory before starting my Ph.D. work. I received the Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2010 on the topic of quantum-limited measurement of nanomechanical motion and ground-state cooling of a mechanical mode. Since then, I have taken a post-doctoral position in Clark Nguyen’s group at UC Berkeley working in a much more applied direction on rf-MEMS for use in oscillators and filters.

Capacitive-Gap Micromechanical Local Oscillator At GHz Frequencies [BPN630]
This project aims to build a MEMS-based on-chip reference oscillator at GHz frequencies. By constructing an array of capacitive transduced micromechanical resonators with extremely small capacitive gaps and high mechanical Q, in conjunction with a low-power CMOS ASIC amplifier, it becomes possible to achieve self-sustained oscillation in a die-level system. The high mechanical Q of these devices, which can reach an extraordinary >40,000 at frequencies up to 3GHz, allows the possibility for unprecedented phase noise performance. Many applications for such high-frequency, low phase-noise oscillators exist, ranging from prosaic mobile communications oscillators, to more exotic uses such as reference clocks for chip-scale atomic clocks.