Azita Emami received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999 and 2004 respectively. She received her B.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology in 1997, with honors. At Stanford she was offered the Solid-State Lab’s merit-based research assistantship, and was a member of VLSI Research Group, where she worked on variety of projects in the areas of integrated circuits and system design. The focus of her research was high-speed and low-power interconnects, clocking and synchronization techniques. During her PhD she also had close collaboration with Stanford Photonics Lab. She designed and implemented low-power transceivers for optical interconnects, with novel techniques for clock and data recovery. As part of this collaboration she worked on optical clock injection using short-pulse lasers.
Professor Emami joined IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in 2004 as a research staff member in the Communication Technologies Department. Her research projects at IBM include DFE receivers for electrical links, clock and data recovery techniques, and novel digital solutions for circuits in highly-scaled CMOS technologies. From Fall 2006 to Summer 2007, she was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in the city of New York.
In 2007, she joined Caltech, where she is now a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering. Her current research interests include mixed-signal integrated circuits and systems, high-speed on-chip and chip-to-chip interconnects, system and circuit design solutions for highly-scaled CMOS technologies, wearable and implantable devices for neural recording, stimulation, and efficient drug delivery.
Manuel Monge received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering (with honors) from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), Lima, Peru, in 2008, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, in 2010. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Caltech. His research interests are analog and mixed-signal circuits and systems, with focus on process variation correction, biomedical circuits and neural interfaces. He spent the summer of 2013 at Samsung Display America Laboratory (SDAL) working on on-chip channel monitoring circuits for high-speed links. Mr. Monge received the 2008 PUCP Best Student Award and 2008 Fulbright Peru Opportunity Grant Scholarship. He is recipient of the 2009 Caltech Atwood Fellowship and third place winner of the 2013 Broadcom Foundation University Research Competition.
Mayank Raj was born in Patna, India, in 1987. He received the B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA, in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Currently, he is working toward the Ph.D. degree at Caltech. The focus of his current research is high-performance mixed-signal integrated circuits for high-speed and low-power optical and electrical interconnects. He spent the summer of 2012 at Xilinx Inc. working on on-chip noise monitoring circuits. Mr. Raj was the recipient of the 2008 Caltech Atwood Fellowship and 2012 Patent Achievement Award from Xilinx Inc.
Saman Saeedi received his double-major B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2010. He received his M.S. degree from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 2011, in electrical engineering. He is currently a member iof MICS group working toward the Ph.D. degree at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. He is currently working on low-power, high-performance mixed-signal integrated circuits; with an emphasis on optical and electrical hybrid integration. He spent the summer of 2012 at Apple Inc. where he worked on calibration techniques for in-cell technology driver IC. Mr. Saeedi received the Atwood fellowship for Fall 2010 and the National Elite Foundation fellowship from 2007 to 2010. He is also a gold medalist of the National Physics Olympiad of Iran in 2005.
Abhinav Agarwal received his bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering from IIT Guwahati in 2013. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. His research interests include analog and mixed-signal circuits and systems, with focus on biomedical systems. He has research experience working as a sophomore summer intern at Korean Advanced Institute of Science & Technology(KAIST), South Korea. As a Mitacs Globalink fellow he has worked as a research assistant at University of British Columbia(UBC) for the summer after junior year. He is also a recipient of the prestigious MV Chauhan IEEE India Best Student Paper Award 2012. As a part of his bachelor’s thesis his team comprising of four people received the General Electric research award of a million Indian rupees on emerging as winners of GE Edison Challenge 2012. Samsung Electronics also offered him the prestigious Samsung Global Fellowship in 2013 to pursue graduate studies in Korea. Abhinav has also served as the first student chair(2012-13) of the IEEE Student Branch at IIT Guwahati.