Electrical and Systems Engineering

ESE PhD Career Outcomes over the last six years

Industry Research: 58.3%
Tenure Track Faculty: 6.3%
Research Faculty: 10.4%
Postdocs: 21.9%
National Labs: 3.1%

ESE PhD Alumni 

Since the Electrical Engineering and Systems Engineering Departments merged in 2002, ESE has awarded 212 Doctorates. The ESE PhD Alumni included below starts with graduates from the 2024-2025 academic year.

Sydney Acosta
MEMS Development Engineer at SiTime

Advisor: Professor Troy Olsson

Thesis Title: Multiferroic Resonators for Wireless Power Transfer and Magnetic Field Sensing in Biomedical Systems

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Adam Alfieri
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania

Advisor: Professor Deep Jariwala

Dissertation Title: Novel van der Waals Chalcogenides for Sustainable Light Harvesting

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

Robert Broberg
Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania

Advisors: Professor Jonathan Smith and Professor Lee Bassett

Thesis Title: QuINT – Quantum Integrated Network Timing

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

KongYao Chee
Senior Guidance & Control Engineer @ DSO National Labs

Advisors: Professor George Pappas and Professor M. Ani Hsieh

Thesis Title: Learning-based Model Predictive Control for Aerial Vehicles

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Sourajit Das
Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State University

Advisor: Professor Alejandro Ribeiro

Thesis Title: GRAPH NEURAL NETWORKS FOR COMMUNICATION IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Xingyu Du
Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania

Advisor: Professor Troy Olsson

Thesis Title: Magnetostatic Surface Wave and Surface Acoustic Wave Devices for Tunable and Energy Efficient Radio Frequency Filters

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

Asma Fallah
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester

 Advisor: Professor Nader Engheta

Thesis Title: Wave Interaction with Nonreciprocal Swift-Electron Platforms and Reconfigurable Metasurfaces

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

David Gonzalez-Medrano
Senior Process Engineer at Princeton Innotech

Advisor: Professor Marc Miskin

Thesis Title: Microscopic Surface Electrochemical Actuators for Voltage-Tunable Optical Elements

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

Kwan-Ho Kim
Postdoctoral researcher at the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics (QSIB) in Professor John Rogers’s group at Northwestern University

Advisor: Professor Deep Jariwala

Thesis Title: Design and Characterization of AlScN-Based Ferroelectric Devices for Non-Volatile Memory Applications

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

Maya Lassiter
Engineer at Atomic Semiconductor

Advisor: Professor Marc Miskin

Thesis Title: Towards General Microscopic Robots

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Chavez Lawrence
Principle Photolithography Sustaining Engineer at Northrop Grumman

Advisor: Professor Cherie Kagan

Thesis Title: Tunable Dielectric Nanocrystal Metasurfaces for Colorimetric Sensing

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Bruce Lee
Postdoctoral Fellow at the ETH AI Center

Advisor: Professor Nikolai Matni

Thesis Title: Statistical Limits and Efficient Algorithms for Learning-Enabled Control

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Eric Lei
Research Scientist at JPMorganChase

Advisor: Professor Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti and Professor Hamed Hassani

Thesis Title: Neural Compression: Estimating and Achieving the Fundamental Limits

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Vahid Nikkhah
Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Advisor: Professor Nader Engheta

Thesis Title: Inverse design for engineering complex light-matter interaction

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Mathieu Ouellet
Postdoctoral Researcher, Cornell University

Advisor: Professor Lee Bassett

Thesis Title: Design and control of dynamical systems: a classical to quantum perspective

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Damian Owerko
Research Scientist at Meta

Advisor: Professor Alejandro Ribeiro

Thesis Title: Machine Learning for Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

D.J. Park
FPGA Architecture @AMD

Advisor: Professor Andre DeHon

Thesis Title: Software-like Incremental Refinement on FPGA using Partial Reconfiguration

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Ali Pirmoradi
Photonics Engineer at Lightmatter

Advisor: Professor Firooz Aflatouni

Thesis Title: Energy-efficient Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing Systems for the Next Generation of Optical Transceivers

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Orlando Romero
AI & Quantitative Finance Fellow @Nasdaq Inc.

Advisor: Professor George Pappas

Thesis Title: A Dynamical Systems Perspective on Optimization Algorithms

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Kaustubh Sridhar
Research Scientist at Google Deepmind

Advisor: Professor Insup Lee

Thesis Title: Training Adaptive and Sample-Efficient Autonomous Agents

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Vishal Venkatesh
Senior Process Engineer at Heat2Power

Advisor: Professor Mark Allen

Thesis Title: Microfabricated devices for in-vivo sensing for mitochondrial assessment

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

Xuan Wang
Electrical Engineer at KLA

Advisor: Professor Mark Allen

Thesis Title:Design and Optimization of Laminated Metallic Cores for High-Frequency Transformers and Inductors

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

Zhiyang Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow at HDSI, UC San Diego; Incoming Assistant Professor at ESE, Washington University in Saint Louis

Advisor: Professor Alejandro Ribeiro

Thesis Title: MANIFOLD FILTERS AND NEURAL NETWORKS: GEOMETRIC GRAPH SIGNAL PROCESSING IN THE LIMIT

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Yahan Yang
Researcher at IBM

Advisor: Professor Insup Lee

Dissertation Title: Safeguarding AI Systems Against Unexpected Inputs

Graduation Year: 2025-2026

Haoqi Zhao
Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University

Advisor: Professor Liang Feng

Thesis Title: TWISTED PHOTONS: FROM INTEGRATED GENERATION TO ROBUST TELEPORTATION TELEPORTATION

Graduation Year: 2024-2025

Industry:

Amazon, AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Ayer Labs, Bosch, Google Deepmind, Facebook, Intel, JP Morgan Chase, Lightmatter, Meta, Microsoft, Nokia Bell Labs, Oracle, RTX, (and many more…)

Academic:

  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Cornell University
  • ETH Zurich
  • John Hopkins University
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Northwestern University
  • University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
  • University of California, San Diego
  • University of Cambridge
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • University of Rochester
  • University of Washington
  • Wesleyan University