Team

In the nano-design group, we strive to create an environment where everyone feels safe and welcome. If you are interested in joining our team - for example, as a student (K-12, undergraduate, graduate), post-doc, industry partner, as a fellow collaborator committed to diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) - please contact me and let me know; we are a brand-new group and are looking to grow!

Principal Investigator: Gage Hills

hills_200x300 I grew up in the Bay Area in northern California, playing soccer and swimming in the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean in Muir Beach, CA. It has been hard to leave the west coast, but I'm starting to feel at home here in Boston.

I finished my PhD at Stanford in 2018 and then joined MIT as a post-doc (working with Professors Subhasish Mitra, H.-S. Philip Wong, and Max Shulaker). During my PhD, I also worked at imec (the Inter-university Micro-Electronics Center in Leuven, Belgium), Intel Labs (Hillsboro, OR), Microsoft (Mountain View, CA), and Canesta (a start-up company developing time-of-flight video cameras). I'm a strong believer in applying theory to practice, and encourage students to gain experience in industry to enhance their research.


Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging

I am proud to be a new member serving on the SEAS Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging this year at Harvard, and am eager to learn more about actions I can take to contribute to diversity in STEM. I am also thankful to the DIB committee for including me as part of the Post-baccalaureate Working Group; our current charge is: "Propose a program design and structure and develop template language faculty can use in grant applications to fund post-bacc students. GSAS currently sponsors a grant-funded post-baccalaureate program that may serve as a model for a similar program at SEAS."

In the nano-design group, we are also planning to develop new outreach programs to bring STEM education to younger audiences not yet in the Harvard community, so that one day they will be. Specifically, we have been brainstorming plans to develop a new outreach program tentatively named "ScienceBusters" (inspired by the "MythBusters" science entertainment television series), to encourage younger students to have the confidence to pursue STEM majors. We plan to leverage our personal expertise in developing electronic hardware systems to create hands-on demonstrations of electronic systems that students would be able to create themselves in a lab (also as part of ScienceBusters). To show students how they can actively contribute to these advances in electronics, we are planning to offer 3-4 sessions as part of a first ScienceBusters curriculum (perhaps over Zoom with a starter-kit of electronic components) that will focus on topics such as creating autonomous robots (like this soccer-playing robot I designed in college), energy harvesting systems that can power the electronics that students are familiar with in their everyday lives, and wearable electronics, in order to create a fun experience that can make students comfortable and excited about pursuing careers in STEM.

If you are interested to learn more about these efforts, or are interested in helping to develop a ScienceBusters curriculum, let me know!

Prospective Students

yourphotohereStarting in a brand-new research group presents unique opportunities for you. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Max Shulaker as he was starting the novel electronics system group at MIT, which gave me a "behind-the-scenes" peek at both the exciting aspects and the challenges of starting a research group. Thus, if your goal is to become a professor in academia, then starting in the nano-design group from day one could be a great experience. If your goal is to join industry, I can help you to excel in the workplace, leveraging experience I gained working at imec, Intel, Microsoft, and Canesta. If you have no idea what you want to do after your PhD, that's OK too (and was the case for me) - whatever your plans are after Harvard, I will do my best to help you achieve your goals.

Since our research spans multiple disciplines, no incoming student is expected to have expertise in every area that we research (myself included). The strength of nano-design is that it is an excellent "technical hub" for multiple disciplines to come together, and so there are not any specific technical pre-requisites for joining the nano-design group. More importantly, we are looking for motivated students who are passionate about their work, and who are willing to work across conventional boundaries to develop interdisciplinary solutions. As a starting point, we may be looking for students interested in nanofabrication, material science, applied physics, nano-device modeling, analog/digital/mixed-signal circuit design, VLSI using emerging nanotechnologies, opto-electronics, robotics, computer architectures, and areas in computer science (e.g., programming languages, compilers). However, if you have expertise in another area that you believe can thrive in the nano-design group, I'm happy to talk to you about it, since we are always looking for new directions to extend our current research. We also work closely with the research groups of David Brooks, Vijay Janapa Reddi, and Gu-Yeon Wei, and I encourage you to check out their research as well for potential connections.

If you are interested in joining the nano-design group, the best way to let me know is to email me. Some things that can be helpful to include in your email are:

  • A little bit about yourself, and why you are interested in the nano-design group.
  • 1-page resume (including any research experience you may have, e.g., in any areas mentioned in our research summary).
  • Any experience with programming languages, simulation environments, or computer-aided design (CAD) tools (while our research doesn't necessarily focus on the development of CAD tools, they can be extremely effective in increasing research productivity). Example CAD tools include: tools from Cadence (Spectre, Virtuoso, Liberate, Allegro, Genus, Innovus, Tempus, Voltus), Synopsys (Sentaurus, SPICE, Silicon Smart, Design Compiler, Integrated Circuit Compiler, Primetime, VCS), Mentor Graphics Calibre, Xilinx Vivado, Altera Quartus, COMSOL Multiphysics, Lumerical (Finite Difference Time Domain). I'm always interested to learn about new tools to make design more productive, so if there are other tools that you have experience with and recommend, I'm happy to hear your suggestions.
  • If you have any links to media or code summarizing any of your existing projects (e.g., your GitHub repository, short presentations, slides, posters, or project videos), those can be great to include as well.

Don't worry if your experience so-far does not seem to overlap heavily with our current research; if you're interested in joining, then we can try to find a way to connect.

Register for our upcoming Electrical Engineering Prospective PhD Student Event on October 14, 2020 @ 3 pm

Apply to grad school at Harvard SEAS

nanodesign group prospective students

check out our 3-minute video for prospective students!