MSE is proud to announce that Ph.D. candidate Amanda Wang (Kioupakis group) was recently awarded a National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

The National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship program was established in 1989 by direction of congress as an approach to increasing the number of U.S. citizens receiving doctoral degrees in science and engineering disciplines of military importance.

Wang's research focuses on modeling the electronic transport properties of wide bandgap semiconductors from first principles. Semiconductors with large bandgaps are able to withstand high applied electric fields, making them ideal for application in high-power and high-frequency devices such as power electronics and radio frequency communication devices. First-principles methods allow researchers to predictively calculate a material's electronic properties without reliance on experimental data and investigate the limiting mechanisms to properties of interest.

"More specifically, I am looking at transport properties in the regime of high applied electric field, where approximations of linearity that we can make at low fields are no longer valid," Wang said. "To accurately calculate high-field transport properties requires explicitly treating the competition between the driving force the field exerts on the electrons and the various mechanisms by which electrons can be scattered and lose energy. I am developing a first-principles computational framework that can calculate the high-field transport properties and will apply it to characterize promising wide bandgap semiconductors."

The highly competitive Fellowship Program has awarded nearly 4400 fellowships from over 65,000 applications since its inception in 1989. 

The NDSEG Fellowship is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the direction of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering.