Alumni

Interview with an MS-EE alumnus - Allen Xu

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Interview with an MS-EE alumnus - Allen Xu Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/03/2023 - 00:00

Learn how performance-based admissions, rigorous course content, and flexibility of the MS-EE on Coursera program at CU Boulder opened career doors for Allen Xu.

Allen Xu received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics before joining the MS-EE on Cousera program. He enrolled in the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MS-EE) on Coursera program in September 2019 during the pilot launch.

In May 2021, Allen graduated with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. We asked Allen a series of questions about his journey with the program and how performance-based admission helped him achieve his goals.

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500 patents: CU Engineering alumnus now among top 100 most prolific inventors

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 21:43:04 +0000

500 patents: CU Engineering alumnus now among top 100 most prolific inventors Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/26/2022 - 15:43

Emily Adams

At this stage in his engineering career, John Melanson (ElEngrCompSci'74) is well aware of how people might view him.

“The stereotype would be ‘now you’re an old engineer, and you do things the same way you always have,’” he said. “I never suffered from that. I never found something that I wanted to do the same way.”

That could be why he just hit a huge milestone: 500 patents, putting Melanson among the top 100 most prolific inventors.

Many of those patents are in the field of audio and electronics, particularly in analog-to-digital signal processing technologies that are instrumental in today’s digital devices. Titled “Driver Circuitry and Operation,” his 500th patent was granted on June 21. He also has 68 pending U.S. patent applications.

Melanson has spent 30 years as an engineer with Cirrus Logic, which he joined when it purchased AudioLogic, a company he co-founded. He credits Cirrus Logic with providing the space for him to continue to be creative and explore new ways of doing things.

“We’ve developed a good attitude toward each other,” Melanson joked. “I go find something interesting to work on, and they've decided, ‘Well, whatever John's doing, it’s hopefully of some use to us, so we'll let him.’”

He also enjoys mentoring the next generation of engineers at Cirrus Logic.

“I love working with young engineers,” Melanson said. “I love working with people that have challenging ideas and different ways to do things and feeling a part of that.”

He credits CU Boulder with putting him on the path to a successful engineering career. Growing up in Boulder, Melanson was always making things — or unmaking them.

“Our neighbor was a chemistry department head, and I tried to go get chemicals that no young boys should be allowed to put their hands on,” he said. “I was always trying to make something that burned, blew up or caused a pretty fire.”

While a student at Fairview High School, he loved his math classes, had a summer programming job at the National Institute of Standards and Technology — where his dad worked — and ran a side business repairing teletype machines. But when it came time for college, he said he wasn’t the kind of student most admissions departments were looking for.

“CU did some really good things for me because they basically let me in when I was not really admissible anywhere,” Melanson said.

He said he’s grateful for professors like Dick Roberts, who saw his potential and allowed him to take a flexible approach to course requirements.

“I got good grades for the first time in my life, and I really, really studied and really liked it, so it was a good environment for me,” Melanson said.

Some of those professors became long-term friends and provided advice as Melanson was starting his first company, NBI, in 1972. His next company would evolve into digital audio companies that would become AudioLogic, which was Cirrus Logic’s first audio customer in 1986.

Melanson’s father also played a unique role in his professional pursuits.

“His hearing had been damaged, and I've been interested in how hearing works and how human perception works,” he said. “Here was somebody who had damaged hearing and could describe to me what he was hearing, who knew what frequencies and sine waves and this technical gobbledygook meant. He was retired and had infinite time to answer my questions about what things sounded like when I changed them and processed them.”

During his time at Cirrus Logic, Melanson has split his time between Austin, Texas, and a home in Estes Park, Colorado. Recently, he bought a home in Larkspur, Colorado, but the move proved challenging, thanks to all of his hobby equipment. Rolling mills, oxyacetylene torches, a 1,000-pound band saw, 5-horsepower table saw — you get the picture.

Melanson calls engineering the “best career you could ever have.”

“It's fun – you get to work on neat and interesting things,” he said. “When you get done with that, you get to work on something else.”

So what has Melanson always wanted to tackle, but hasn’t gotten a chance to yet?

“Something will probably come up this afternoon.”

Photo courtesy of Cirrus Logic

Many of John Melanson's patents are in the field of audio and electronics, particularly in analog-to-digital signal processing technologies that are instrumental in today’s digital devices.

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Interview with an MS-EE alumnus - Luis Plata

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 18:53:14 +0000

Interview with an MS-EE alumnus - Luis Plata Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/23/2022 - 12:53

Discover how Luis Plata was able to gain a master’s degree and graduate certificate while working full time.

Luis Plata was a senior mechanical engineer before joining the MS-EE on Coursera Program.

In January 2021, Luis obtained the Industrial Internet of Things Graduate Certificate, and in December 2021, Luis graduated with a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder and attended the May 2022 graduation ceremony.

Read more about his experience with performance-based admission in the MS-EE on Coursera program here.

Discover how Luis Plata was able to gain a master’s and certificate while working full time.

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Interview with an MS-EE alumnus - John Trytko

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 00:31:00 +0000

Interview with an MS-EE alumnus - John Trytko Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/20/2022 - 18:31

Learn how performance-based admissions, affordability, and flexibility of the MS-EE on Coursera program at CU Boulder helped John Trytko achieve his goals.

John Trytko graduated with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder.

We interviewed John regarding his background, active role, and overall experience with the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MS-EE) program, hosted by Coursera, and how the program helped him achieve his goals.

For more information, read the blog.

Learn how performance-based admissions, affordability, and flexibility of the MS-EE on Coursera program at CU Boulder helped John Trytko achieve his goals.

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Mission ready: Alumnus launches startup at CU to inspire climate action

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 14:46:04 +0000

Mission ready: Alumnus launches startup at CU to inspire climate action Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/14/2022 - 08:46

Scott King's goal with Mission Zero is to harness the knowledge of faculty, passion of students and growing interest from alumni and the business community to engage people in changing their behavior.

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Alumna wins federal honor for 3D printing innovations

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 22:31:14 +0000

Alumna wins federal honor for 3D printing innovations Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/21/2021 - 15:31

Catherine Arnold

When Callie Higgins (MElEngr’14, PhD’17) went to Washington, D.C., this fall to receive a federal medal for emerging leaders, she found herself sharing the Kennedy Center stage with two researchers who developed the COVID-19 vaccine.

It was humbling, said Higgins, “but it also helped fortify why I want to continue in public service and stay at NIST and in the government. I do research to give back to everyone, and I hope my research will give back.”

A researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Boulder Laboratory, Higgins was among 13 winners of the 2021 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, honoring excellence in the federal workforce.

Known as the Oscars of government service, the “Sammies” are allocated by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. Finalists for the medal were selected from more than 350 nominations.

Higgins was honored for her invention of groundbreaking technology to detect, remedy, and reverse-engineer microscopic flaws that threaten the safety and reliability of 3D-printed products. The work potentially revolutionizes the medical, plastics, coating, optics and additive manufacturing fields.

She started at NIST as a postdoctoral fellow in 2017, after completing her PhD in Professor Bob McLeod’s lab. NIST hired her as a research engineer in 2019, and Higgins said she is thrilled with the collaboration available in Boulder and the state.

“Colorado is an incredible hotbed of researchers, with so much talent in industry, government and academia,” Higgins said. “And being at CU Boulder was a terrific opportunity to have such access to collaborators. So many people here see value in collaborating, not reinventing the wheel. That’s had me excited, pushing this field forward with wonderful collaborators.”

At NIST, Higgins joined forces with fellow research engineer Jason Killgore to launch the 3D-printing project in 2018. As a postdoc, Higgins had proposed finding ways to detect manufacturing imperfections that occur in 3D printing, as part of understanding fundamental properties of materials containing natural or synthetic substances called photopolymers that contain very large molecules and react to light.

Unseen, microscale weaknesses sometimes occur in materials as polymers or plastic form into a solid. A 3D printed heart or lung, for instance, could fail if its makeup contained tiny flaws.

To solve the problem, Higgins and the team developed a method to measure how and where a material’s physical composition changes in real time at the smallest proportions as curing occurs. Prior to Higgins’ work, product analysis could only be done at millimeter-length scales, but her method allows products to be assessed at the sub micrometer level.

She and her team continue to research and refine the work, which Higgins calls “an opportunity to dive deeply into the fundamental science of this really neat printing technology, knowing our research is adding value and driving innovation for the U.S. in the commerce space.”

At CU, Higgins learned about photopolymer manufacturing by building models, and she began applying for roles in tissue engineering at the end of her doctoral program. She was eager to take her skills into that field, which combines cells, engineering, materials methods, and biochemistry to restore or replace human tissues.

Now that her work is giving back in that field, she has hopes for the near future.

“I would like to see us get closer to printing a small version of a lung, a kidney, or bone cartilage interface,” Higgins said. “I think we are getting very close to doing that.”

Higgins was among 13 winners of the 2021 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, honoring excellence in the federal workforce.

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CU alum creates AI robots to sort recyclables

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 19:28:20 +0000

CU alum creates AI robots to sort recyclables Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/07/2021 - 13:28

Matanya Horowitz (ApMath, CompSci, Econ, ElCompEngr’10; MElEngr’10) is the founder of AMP Robotics. His vision? Use artificial intelligence to elevate the recycling industry.

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Alumna a finalist for federal Service to America Medal

Anonymous — Thu, 06 May 2021 19:29:35 +0000

Alumna a finalist for federal Service to America Medal Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/06/2021 - 13:29

Callie Higgins (MElEngr'14, PhD'17) is a materials research engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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Explorations of science and society lead alumna to role as intersectional scientist

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 22:28:55 +0000

Explorations of science and society lead alumna to role as intersectional scientist Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/12/2021 - 16:28

Emily Adams

Kendra Krueger (MElEngr’11) is an engineer by training, but she had to come up with her own title to encompass all of her passions in science, education, philosophy and art.

She landed on “intersectional scientist” – someone who’s interested in how science can be a tool for personal discovery and liberation. Today, she combines those passions as a science education coordinator at City University of New York’s Advanced Science Research Center and as the founder of 4Love and Science, her own project in “mindful scientific research and innovation for the good of the people.”

Paths to explore

Krueger’s own path in STEM started with a program at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. As a drama major at LaGuardia High School for Art and the Performing Arts – made famous by the movie Fame – she was looking for something different to do in the summer.

As the museum research program led them through different topics, she was quickly drawn to the scope of astrophysics and astronomy. But she also wanted to find a way to work with her hands and build things.

“I learned that you could make the telescopes and make these instruments. So I got really into this idea of helping to make radio telescopes,” Krueger said. “I wanted to be building the tools behind the science. I wanted to be making these things but still be involved in the physics and science world.”

After high school, she studied electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, including an internship at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. Along the way, she took a course in microelectronics and semiconductor physics, which sent her on a new path.

“There was also something really philosophical about it that spoke to me, this transfer of energy between these little beings and how they exist in these different states and can be manipulated in different ways to be at these different states,” she said. “It reminded me of different states of consciousness.”

Facing a stagnant job market when she graduated in 2009, Krueger decided to continue on for a master’s degree. She decided to pay CU Boulder Professor Garret Moddel a visit after a reading about his interests in everything from zero-point energy to psi phenomena.

“We had a huge philosophical conversation about science and engineering and all these other things,” she said. “So all the pieces sort of came together to come into the nanostructures program.”

A new narrative

Krueger gives a guest lecture for a CU Boulder electrical engineering first-year seminar.

As a master’s student, Kruger worked in Moddel’s lab fabricating and characterizing graphene geometric diodes for rectenna solar cells, as well as on a project in nanotechnology ethics. As she dug deeper into the ethics topic, she found it didn’t quite fit with the questions she’d begun to explore.

“The problem with ethics is that people tie the word ‘ethics’ to safety and fraud and practices in science,” she said. “Whereas I was more looking at the philosophical aspects of what is this technology and how is it really influencing society?”

While cementing her skills and confidence as an engineer at a job with PixelTeq in Golden, she was pulled to both her acting roots and her science/society questioning while participating in a friend’s MFA project at Naropa University. Through the play, which explored mindfulness, somatic movement and self-discovery, Krueger found herself thinking of the process of scientific discovery.

“I realized that self-discovery is the same process as doing science in the external world – making observations and creating hypotheses that try things out and experimenting. We do the same thing in our internal world, too,” she said. “It occurred to me, why are these things so separated? Is there a way that we can learn to do them together – to create a scientific practice that is not only about learning about our external world but also learning about our internal world simultaneously?”

Krueger’s exploration came as a deeper conversations about diversity and equity in STEM were taking root in the wider science community.

“As we're learning now, in terms of how bias affects the work that's created, as much as we want science and engineering and technology to be neutral, it's created by humans,” she said. “It's never going to be fully neutral, and that's OK. It's just that we have to acknowledge the ways that we do influence it with our bias, with our background, with our experiences, with our dreams, with our desires, with our passion and our joy.”

Passion projects

Today, Krueger has been able to combine many of her skills as a science educator, developing field trips and programs for kids. She is most excited about their new Community Sensor Lab, which she developed in partnership with an environmental scientist who creates do-it-yourself sensors for monitoring carbon dioxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds.

“We developed a whole curriculum to learn about the sensors and environmental justice and why these low-cost sensors are so powerful in the hands of people,” she said. “As we developed it and did a pilot program with the high school students, we realized the power of the technology and the impact that it could have in our local communities right away.”

For example, part of their program will include teaching people to install, monitor and train others to work with sensors in community gardens throughout the Lower East Side, where a community-designed project to create green space in areas damaged by Hurricane Sandy was scrapped in favor of a sea wall. The sensors will allow the community to independently monitor the effects of construction, while also giving people skills they can use to pursue available training programs as lab technicians.

Krueger said she feels lucky to be at a place that is pushing the boundaries of interdisciplinary science and community education, though she can’t answer now what the future holds for her own explorations.

“I've learned that I need, at least for my life, a lot more flexibility with where the future takes me and have smaller goals,” she said. “But having good working relationships is really important to me – creating more collaborations, always more collaborations.”

Kendra Krueger (MElEngr’11) is an engineer by training, but she had to come up with her own title to encompass all of her passions in science, education, philosophy and art.

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Alumnus awarded IEEE Fellow status for semiconductor testing innovations

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 16:24:19 +0000

Alumnus awarded IEEE Fellow status for semiconductor testing innovations Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/06/2021 - 09:24

Congratulations to alumnus Bryan Root (ElEngr’84), who was recently elevated to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow for leadership in improving semiconductor reliability test methods.

Each year, less than 0.1% of IEEE voting members are selected for fellow status, the group’s highest membership level. It recognizes “extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.”

Root is the founder, owner and chairman of Celadon Systems, a Minnesota-based company that manufactures ultra-high performance wafer probe cards for the semiconductor industry. He started the company in 1997.

“Being recognized by my peers as an IEEE Fellow is one of the greatest honors of my life. But my achievements are built on the foundation of the professors, advisors, knowledge and excellence that I learned at CU Boulder,” Root said. “This achievement is also built on the shoulders of the many patient mentors that helped me through the years, two of which I am sad to say are no longer with us – Bob Thomas of RADC and Harry Schafft of NIST.”

Here’s what Root’s nominator, Chris Henderson of Semitracks Inc. in Albuquerque, had to say about his distinguished career:

Mr. Root is a pioneer and key innovator in semiconductor wafer level test. His revolutionary work spans 35 years and is used by more than 300 semiconductor companies and institutions around the world. In reliability and device test, he has been a key researcher, inventor, developer, implementer, evangelist, manufacturer and a driver of industry standards. These contributions touch every device manufactured by the industry. Manufacturers report quicker time to market by eliminating packaging before testing, reducing test time and time to test, and reducing the cost of test. Mr. Root’s work has quickened the pace of the industry by lowering costs and improving device functionality and reliability.

Mr. Root’s contributions began in 1984, when he started his research on methods to assess the reliability of devices and structures at the wafer level. His research focus was to accelerate semiconductor reliability testing from weeks to days or even seconds. This required new test methods and improving existing test methods. The result of his significant body of work has been his invention of SWEAT (the Standard Wafer-level Electromigration Accelerated Test), a breakthrough in semiconductor reliability testing that ushered in the era of Wafer-Level Reliability (WLR) characterization, and for the first time, thin film metallization reliability testing could be incorporated as a monitor in the manufacturing process flow; his refinement and popularization of the Isothermal test (a fast wafer level electromigration test); and the invention and development of equipment and probe cards for parallel large sample size wafer level reliability tests.

Additionally, through Mr. Root’s founding and leadership of the JEDEC 14.2 standards committee on wafer level reliability. he drove the standardization and popular use of tests for electromigration (contributing his own work on SWEAT and the Isothermal test), TDDB (Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown) and HCI (Hot Carrier Injection). With the foundation of these standards in the public domain, and the adoption by other standards organizations like JEITA, researchers continue to refine and publish new work. To add to this impressive list of accomplishments. Mr. Root’s pioneering work beginning in 1987 resulted in the first commercially successful equipment for electromigration, TDDB and HCI test. This equipment continues to be widely used in the semiconductor industry.

In 1997, Mr. Root shifted his focus to solving the theretofore insurmountable industry problem of precisely and reliably probing and measuring electrical parameters on wafers under extreme conditions. Mr. Root’s inventions and 66 patents are now widely used in the industry and have resulted in:

the only full wafer (200mm and 300mm) crash resistant multi-site massively parallel test probe cards for reliability and burn-in, capable of sustained use up to 400°C, some of which have endured continuous use at temperatures above 250°C for several years

invented the first crash resistant, low current leakage (fA), low EMI noise, device and reliability test probe card capable of long term sustained use at -65°C to 400°C;

invented the first device test probe card for sustained use at 600°C

invented the first fast-settling ultra-low current leakage (sub 1 fA/V at 23°C and sub 10fA/V at 300°C) probe card for long-term sustained use at temperatures of -65°C to 300°C

invented the first small format low-leakage, crash resistant, 4K to 300°C probe card for single site or multi-site use in device test or reliability test

invented the first low leakage low noise quick-swap parametric probe core

invented the first parametric probe card indexer for swapping cores in seconds enabling “lights out” in situ diagnostics

invented the first non-magnetic close-coupling, swappable, probe core for ultra-high magnetic field (up to 0.8T) testing

invented the first high voltage(3000V) 23°C to 200°C swappable core utilizing a temperature controllable air jet for pressure and turbulence to suppress surface arcing

invented an ultra-stable functional test probe card for sustained use at high temperatures.

Today, tens of thousands of Mr. Root’s ultra-reliable mission critical probing solutions are in use by many semiconductor companies, universities and institutions in research labs, reliability labs, parametric test floors and functional test floors.

Mr. Root’s seminal work in Wafer-Level Reliability was initiated at Mostek as a device reliability engineer, continued at Sperry as a senior device engineer, accelerated with the founding of Sienna Technologies, and continues today after he founded Celadon Systems in 1997. Mr. Root continues to mentor and fund young engineers and interns in high voltage device and reliability test and RF reliability research.

Bryan Root (ElEngr’84) is the founder, owner and chairman of Celadon Systems, which manufactures ultra-high performance wafer probe cards for the semiconductor industry.

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