A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical microchip that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable photonic integrated circuit could be used in a wide range of advanced technologies.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Max Parsons is featured in this UW News article about the Quantum Technologies Training and Testbed lab.
A research team led by UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden has used game theory to create a new computational framework for neural interfaces that can adapt to the user — offering a new approach to improving human-machine interaction.
This award honors Nirere’s academic achievements and research aimed at bringing electricity and renewable energy to remote, underserved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
UW ECE doctoral student Devin Murphy, working in the lab of Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo and collaborating with MIT, has created OpenTouch Glove — a cost-effective, accessible, tactile sensing glove based on flexible printed circuit board technology.
UW ECE alumna Thy Tran (BSEE ‘93) is the Vice President of Global Front-End Procurement at Micron Technology, a worldwide leader in the semiconductor industry. Despite humble beginnings as a Vietnamese refugee, she built an outstanding career as well as a life defined by purpose, achievement, and service.
A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical microchip that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable photonic integrated circuit could be used in a wide range of advanced technologies.
UW ECE Assistant Professor Max Parsons is featured in this UW News article about the Quantum Technologies Training and Testbed lab.
A research team led by UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden has used game theory to create a new computational framework for neural interfaces that can adapt to the user — offering a new approach to improving human-machine interaction.
This award honors Nirere’s academic achievements and research aimed at bringing electricity and renewable energy to remote, underserved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
UW ECE doctoral student Devin Murphy, working in the lab of Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo and collaborating with MIT, has created OpenTouch Glove — a cost-effective, accessible, tactile sensing glove based on flexible printed circuit board technology.
UW ECE alumna Thy Tran (BSEE ‘93) is the Vice President of Global Front-End Procurement at Micron Technology, a worldwide leader in the semiconductor industry. Despite humble beginnings as a Vietnamese refugee, she built an outstanding career as well as a life defined by purpose, achievement, and service.
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A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical microchip that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable photonic integrated circuit could be used in a wide range of advanced technologies.
At quantum testbed lab, researchers across the UW probe ‘spooky’ mysteries of quantum phenomena
UW ECE Assistant Professor Max Parsons is featured in this UW News article about the Quantum Technologies Training and Testbed lab.
UW research team applies game theory to create a new framework for neural interface design
A research team led by UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden has used game theory to create a new computational framework for neural interfaces that can adapt to the user — offering a new approach to improving human-machine interaction.
UW ECE graduate student Eliane Nirere receives 2026 Vadari fellowship award for research helping to bring electricity to remote African communities
This award honors Nirere’s academic achievements and research aimed at bringing electricity and renewable energy to remote, underserved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
A smart glove with its own sense of touch
UW ECE doctoral student Devin Murphy, working in the lab of Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo and collaborating with MIT, has created OpenTouch Glove — a cost-effective, accessible, tactile sensing glove based on flexible printed circuit board technology.
A fearless leader and a lifelong learner
UW ECE alumna Thy Tran (BSEE ‘93) is the Vice President of Global Front-End Procurement at Micron Technology, a worldwide leader in the semiconductor industry. Despite humble beginnings as a Vietnamese refugee, she built an outstanding career as well as a life defined by purpose, achievement, and service.
A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical microchip that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable photonic integrated circuit (closeup shown above) could be used in a wide range of applications, including information processing, sensing, imaging, and artificial intelligence. Photo by Jayita Dutta.[/caption]
As technology advances, and the demand for faster, higher-bandwidth, and more energy-efficient data processing continues to grow, scientists and engineers search for ways to improve electronic systems. One avenue they have been exploring is optoelectronics — the study and application of electronic devices that interface with light by detecting, emitting, or converting it into electrical signals. Optoelectronics offers significant advantages over conventional electronics, including faster speed, higher bandwidth, lower power consumption, and improved reliability.
One particularly promising direction in optoelectronics has been the development of the photonic integrated circuit — an optical microchip that uses light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) to sense, process, and transmit information. These optical chips are already being used in many advanced technologies today, such as high-speed fiber-optic communications, data center interconnects, sensors for autonomous vehicles, and hardware accelerators for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Despite these advantages, photonic integrated circuits present a major challenge: each optoelectronic application requires a separate photonic integrated circuit design, much like application-specific integrated circuits, or ASIC chips for conventional electronics. This lengthens the prototyping cycle and increases costs. As a result, engineers have been developing programmable photonic integrated circuits, which enable the circuit to be reconfigured by users after manufacturing to perform specific, customized computational and signal-processing tasks. This type of circuit is an optical counterpart to the more commonly known electronic field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, which is used in many of today’s high-performance and advanced technologies.
However, programmable photonic integrated circuits present their own challenges. Many consume significant power, occupy large physical footprints, and suffer from unwanted heat transfer in densely packed systems. High power demand arises because most optical chips require a constant flow of electricity, even during static operation. These limitations have slowed the adoption of programmable photonics beyond specialized research environments.
[caption id="attachment_40968" align="alignleft" width="450"]
UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar (left) and UW ECE alumnus Rui Chen (Ph.D. ECE ‘25, right), who was the lead author of the Science Advances paper. Chen is a postdoctoral research associate in the Photonics Materials Lab at MIT, and he was a doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when this research took place. Photo of Majumdar by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE.[/caption]
Now, as described in the journal Science Advances, a research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical chip — a programmable photonic integrated circuit that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable microchip addresses issues with device footprint and heat transfers by using phase change materials — a technology that consumes no static power. The chip has the potential to be applied in a wide range of technologies, including information processing, sensing, imaging, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
“This optical chip could help to accelerate the prototyping cycle while reducing power consumption for applications like AI computing. Our study is also the first time someone has shown that these kinds of optical circuits can be controlled with electrical signals, reliably and very accurately,” said lead author and UW ECE alumnus Rui Chen (Ph.D. ECE ‘25). Chen is a postdoctoral research associate in the Photonics Materials Lab at MIT, and he was a doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when the bulk of this research took place. He added, “We built our circuit using common foundry processes, which demonstrates the scalability of the system.”
Chen and Majumdar’s research team fabricated their chip in the Washington Nanofabrication Facility, on silicon wafers provided by Intel Corporation. Intel and the National Science Foundation’s Future of Semiconductors Program provided funding and support for the work, which took place over the last four years in Majumdar’s lab and at the WNF. Other team members included UW ECE doctoral students Andrew Tang, Jayita Dutta, and Virat Tara as well as UW alumni Julian Ye (BS Physics ‘25) and Zhuoran Fang (Ph.D. EE ‘23).
Low power, reconfigurable, scalable
A key advantage of the team’s optical chip is that it consumes substantially less power than its counterparts. It accomplishes this by using phase-change materials to store, process, and transmit data. Phase-change materials, which are used to house data on CDs and DVDs, can contain information in a stable, “nonvolatile” state, requiring little to no power to do so. Until now, the challenge with using phase-change materials in programmable photonic integrated circuits has been optical loss and data bit precision, but Majumdar and Chen’s team found ways to address both of those issues.
“Typical ways of building optical circuits require you to input constant power into your system. That’s problematic for a lot of applications that require reconfiguration of the circuit, such as artificial intelligence,” Chen said. “Here, we’ve created a system you can change and leave in place without any power supply, and it maintains its state by itself.”
This optical chip can also be reconfigured, or reprogrammed, by the user for multiple applications. Chen said he saw this chip as a platform for enabling a wide range of technologies, especially high-demand, complex computation applications, such as training neural networks in artificial intelligence. And because the research team has demonstrated the scalability of the circuit by fabricating it using conventional foundry processes, this chip is on a trajectory to move from the lab into the real world.
Looking ahead
This ongoing work highlights the growing role of UW ECE in advancing scalable optoelectronic technologies, but Chen noted that there is still more research and development to do before their optical chip will be ready for the marketplace. The UW and MIT are working together on this long-term effort, and Chen intends to continue his collaboration with Majumdar.
“An important next step is to test this optical chip in some real applications,” Chen said. “We’d like to put this circuit in application scenarios, such as AI computing, optical switches in data center infrastructure, and optical sensing.”
Another upcoming project will be for the team to build a larger-scale optoelectronic system containing the optical chip. This system will include the chip, an electrical control board, and automated algorithms. Chen said that he and Majumdar will also be working on increasing the speed and number of times the phase-change materials in the circuit can be switched from one state to another. This impacts the types of applications the chip might be a good fit for.
“This new optical chip provides a pretty powerful platform for the advancement of optoelectronics in the sense that it can promise a larger-scale system, it doesn’t need a complicated control scheme, and it doesn’t require static power,” Chen said. “Those factors, taken together, promise scalable optical systems, which eventually could lead to lower power consumption and reduced cost for many advanced applications and technologies coming online today.”
For more information about this research, read “NEO-PGA: Nonvolatile electro-optically programmable gate array” in Science Advances.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_40646" align="alignright" width="600"]
A research team led by UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden has applied game theory to create a new computational framework for designing neural interfaces that adapt to the user. Their work offers a new, principled approach to improving human-machine interaction. Shown above: An experiment participant uses their forearm muscle contractions, with help from a neural interface, to move a cursor (blue dot) toward a target (red dot) onscreen. Photo courtesy of Maneeshika Madduri.[/caption]
There is an exciting future on the horizon — one in which your thoughts could directly control electronic devices you use every day. In many ways, that future is already here, enabled by neural interfaces — engineered devices designed to exchange information with the body’s nervous system. From consumer wearables to clinical devices, electronics controlled by neural interfaces are making their way into the marketplace and medical practice. These technologies are demonstrating potential for augmenting, and even restoring, human capabilities in profound ways.
For example, electroencephalogram (EEG) headbands, such as Muse and Neurosity Crown, are being used to help people improve mental focus. Electromyography (EMG) wristbands, such as the Meta Neural Band and the Mudra Band for the Apple Watch, can enable hands-free control of electronic devices through subtle finger movements. And implantable neural interfaces, such as the Synchron Stenrode and Neuralink’s Telepathy chip, are allowing paralyzed patients to use neural impulses to control computers, digital devices, and robotic limbs.
But despite these remarkable advances, there is still much work to be done to optimize these technologies and make them useful for large numbers of people. One of the most significant barriers is that neural interfaces need to be customized to some degree for each individual user — because no two brains or bodies are exactly alike.
Customizing the control of a neural interface for the unique brain of each user is advantageous for ensuring desired outcomes and reliable performance. When considering the vast diversity of human nervous systems and the scale required for real-world deployment of this technology, it becomes clear how daunting this challenge can be for scientists and engineers.
To help address this challenge, UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden are working together to build a strong foundation for engineers developing neural interfaces that can learn from and adapt to individual users.
“Before this study, we couldn’t design co-adaptive neural interfaces from any sort of principled approach. It was always ad hoc. But now, if engineers are designing a system where they anticipate learning on the part of the user and in the neural interface, they will have a framework they can use to design that system.”
— Amy Orsborn, Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering
In a recent paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, Orsborn, Burden, and their research team describe a new computational framework for neural interface design that is based in large part on game theory, the mathematical study of strategic interactions among rational decision-makers. In this setting, the “decision-makers” are the human user and the adaptive algorithms embedded within the neural interface itself. And the “game” isn’t about competition — it’s about cooperation. Both the human user and the neural interface continually adjust their strategies, learning from each other to improve performance over time.
[caption id="attachment_40661" align="alignleft" width="600"]
Amy Orsborn (left), a Chern Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering and Sam Burden (right), a UW ECE associate professor. Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
“This study is perhaps the first to bring game theory, and to a lesser extent, control theory, into neural engineering,” Orsborn said. “It’s one of a very small subset of studies that are trying to use those kinds of computational and mathematical frameworks for this setting.”
Orsborn is a well-known leader in the field of neural engineering, working at the intersection of engineering and neuroscience to develop therapeutic neural interfaces for restoration and rehabilitation of human sensorimotor capabilities. She is a Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor in UW ECE and the UW Department of Bioengineering as well as a faculty member of the Center for Neurotechnology at the UW. She also serves as a scientific adviser for Meta Reality Labs.
Burden is a UW ECE associate professor known for his work discovering and formalizing principles of human sensorimotor control, focusing on applications in robotics, neural engineering, and human-AI interaction.
“The basic idea we had was that game theory could be the right computational framework to get predictions for what the outcome of interactions between the user and the neural interface might be and then be able to shape those outcomes toward a desired end state and better performance,” Burden said. “For example, in a rehabilitation setting, you could design a neural interface that elicits movement or muscle activity that otherwise might be hard to command or instruct somebody to do.”
Developing mathematical and computational frameworks for neural interface design is a long-term effort. Orsborn and Burden said they anticipate continuing this line of research for several years and widening their collaboration to involve other UW ECE faculty.
In this study, their research team was a cross-disciplinary group of UW graduate and undergraduate students. The group included the paper’s lead author and UW ECE alumna Maneeshika Madduri (Ph.D. ECE ‘24), who was a doctoral student at the time the research took place. UW ECE alumna Momona Yamagami (Ph.D. EE ‘22), also a doctoral student at the time of the study, co-authored the paper along with bioengineering doctoral student Si Jia Li and UW alumnus Sasha Burckhardt (B.S. in Neuroscience ‘23), who was an undergraduate student during the study. Orsborn and Burden were senior authors providing oversight and guidance for the research and experiments that took place in their labs.
From theory to practice — an experimental validation
[caption id="attachment_40649" align="alignright" width="600"]
In the research team's experiment, the participant wears a strip of EMG electrodes on their forearm, secured by tape. The electrodes record muscle activity and send this information to a data processor and an adaptive, algorithmic decoder. The decoder output determines cursor velocity that is then integrated into the system to display cursor position onscreen. Together, the EMG electrode strip, the data processor, and the algorithmic decoder make up the neural interface. Illustration provided by Maneeshika Madduri.[/caption]
Besides bringing game theory into neural engineering, another thing that made this study unique was the inclusion of an experiment that demonstrated and validated the computational framework developed by the research team. In the experiment, the human participant attempts to control a cursor and follow a target onscreen, using muscle contractions in their forearm. The participant wears a strip of EMG electrodes on the surface of their forearm skin, secured by tape. The electrodes record muscle activity and send this information to a data processor and an adaptive, algorithmic decoder. The decoder output determines cursor velocity that is then integrated into the system to display cursor position onscreen. Together, the EMG electrode strip, the data processor, and the algorithmic decoder make up the neural interface.
This experiment took place in a closed-loop system, considered as such because the human participant sees the cursor and target onscreen and converts what they see into neural signals that travel to their arm, resulting in muscle contractions and electrical signals from motor neurons in the forearm. Those signals are then picked up by the EMG electrodes and sent to the data processor and adaptive decoder, which then resets the cursor position onscreen, closing the information loop.
The neural interface was also considered to be co-adaptive. This is because both the human participant and the algorithms in the neural interface are learning and adapting alongside each other, seeking to accomplish the task and optimize performance together.
"We’re doing human-centered engineering, as opposed to just making a device and then requiring the user to adapt to it. Here, we’re making devices that adapt to you.” — UW ECE Associate Professor Sam Burden
This experiment validated the research team’s new computational framework for closed-loop, co-adaptive neural interfaces, allowing researchers to predict how algorithmic changes would impact the neural interface performance and revealing how various properties of the interface itself could shape or nudge user behavior toward better performance or preferred outcomes.
“Before this study, we couldn’t design co-adaptive neural interfaces from any sort of principled approach. It was always ad hoc,” Orsborn said. “But now, if engineers are designing a system where they anticipate learning on the part of the user and in the neural interface, they will have a framework they can use to design that system.”
What’s next for neural interfaces at UW ECE
[caption id="attachment_40651" align="alignright" width="600"]
A view of the EMG electrode strip used by the research team. Photo provided by Maneeshika Madduri.[/caption]
Next steps for Orsborn and Burden include continuing to build on the computational framework they have developed by testing more machine learning and AI algorithms that lead to distinct, measurable outcomes within the context of neural interface design. They also have discussed bringing AI into the system loop in a more substantive way to enable more intelligent customization of the user experience.
UW ECE has several faculty members who engage in neural engineering research, so Orsborn and Burden are already planning to bring their work on mathematical and computational frameworks for neural interface design to other collaborative projects within the Department. Burden is putting together projects and proposals with UW ECE professors Lillian Ratliff, Kim Ingraham, and Yiyue Luo to further develop these frameworks and apply the research to exoskeletons and wearable technologies. Orsborn is looking forward to building on her current collaboration with UW ECE Associate Professor Eli Shlizerman, who holds a joint appointment in applied mathematics. They are currently conducting studies modeling how a person’s brain changes while using a neural interface.
Orsborn and Burden both said that they were enthusiastic about what the future holds as they build out this body of research in collaborative ways.
“I’m really excited about the future directions that this research opens up — the possibility that we can design these systems to shape positive outcomes for people,” Orsborn said. “That has a huge range of potential applications, which are all very much new and to be explored in how useful or productive they will be, but that’s what gets me really excited because it opens a lot of new doors for exploration.”
Burden added, “I’d also like people to know that we’re doing human-centered engineering, as opposed to just making a device and then requiring the user to adapt to it. Here, we’re making devices that adapt to you.”
Learn more about this topic in the article, “Computational framework to predict and shape human-machine interactions in closed-loop, co-adaptive neural interfaces,” in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. Research funding was provided by Meta Reality Labs Research and the National Science Foundation.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_40369" align="alignright" width="575"]
UW ECE doctoral student Eliane Nirere has received a 2026 fellowship award from the Sarala Vadari Endowed Fund in Electrical & Computer Engineering. The award honors her academic achievements and research aimed at bringing electricity and renewable energy to remote, underserved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Photo by Digitec Studios in Rwanda.[/caption]
This academic quarter, UW ECE doctoral student Eliane Nirere received a 2026 fellowship award from the Sarala Vadari Endowed Fund in Electrical & Computer Engineering — a fund established at UW ECE to foster advanced education in Power and Energy Systems. Each year, the fund recognizes an exceptional UW ECE graduate student in this field of study. This year’s fellowship award honors Nirere’s academic achievements and her research aimed at bringing electricity and renewable energy to remote, underserved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“This fellowship means a lot to me, and it came to the right person at the right time. It has helped me to extend my working hours and be able to devote more time to my research,” Nirere said. “The funding from the Vadari fellowship is helping me to achieve more, and it is contributing to research that is making change for people who need it.”
A personal mission shaped by experience
Nirere was born and raised in Rwanda, where she saw firsthand how a lack of electricity affects education, health, and economic opportunity. As a child, she wanted to help address the problem, even though she did not yet know what the solution could be. In school, she excelled in math and physics. So, at the university level, she decided to major in engineering, hoping to work in one of the local utilities on the technical side of electricity generation.
“To achieve a transition to renewable energy, we will need decentralized systems, such as mini-grids, to electrify rural areas and also supplement and integrate renewable energies in the larger grids. It’s important to note that these systems, which we optimize or develop as engineers, need to be usable and benefit the communities they serve. To achieve that, we need to include the community perspective in our planning.” — UW ECE doctoral student Eliane Nirere
In 2020, she received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical and energy engineering from the University of Rwanda. She went on to pursue graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University Africa, where, in 2022, she graduated with a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering with a concentration in power and energy systems.
“During my graduate studies, I was exposed to renewable energy research and how it could help bring electricity to people in rural and remote areas,” she said. “I was really moved by that experience and inspired and eager to join other people involved in this work.”
Nirere came to UW ECE in 2023 to pursue her doctoral degree. Since then, she has divided her time between research in the lab and leading data collection projects in Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. Nirere works closely with small communities in these countries to ensure their voices are heard in the complex process of building electrical grids and systems based on renewable energy. She uses machine learning techniques to incorporate community input into electrification planning, which helps ensure that the systems built closely match the needs and expectations of the people for which they are intended to serve.
“We hope that this award will encourage other outstanding students like Eliane to come to the UW to complete their doctoral degree here, and like Eliane, do research for the betterment of all,” said UW ECE alumnus and Affiliate Professor Subramanian (Mani) Vadari (MSEE ‘86, Ph.D. EE ‘91).
Vadari, along with his brother, Viswanathan (Vish) Vadari, and their sister, Meenakshi Ganesh, created the Sarala Vadari Endowed Fund in Electrical & Computer Engineering in 2013 to honor their mother — Vadari Sarala Ramachandran. According to Mani Vadari, she had many roles in life, including wife, mother, teacher, friend, mentor, chef extraordinaire, artist, role model, and problem solver. He said that his mother’s larger-than-life personality was instrumental in his and his siblings’ development as successful educators and engineers.
Mani Vadari is an IEEE Life Fellow as well as the founder and president of Modern Grid Solutions, a consulting firm that advises electric utilities and vendors on smart grid technologies, renewable energy integration, and modernizing electrical systems. In addition to his affiliation with UW ECE, he is also an adjunct professor at Washington State University. Vish Vadari is a Global Senior Technology Specialist at ZF Automotive and is a recognized expert in the field of acoustics, vibrations, and noise abatement. Meenakshi Ganesh is a former high school teacher, who is retired and living in Chennai, India.
Community engagement that benefits electrification planning
[caption id="attachment_40392" align="alignright" width="475"]
Nirere (right) with her adviser, UW ECE Assistant Professor June Lukuyu, in the IDEAS Research Lab. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Community engagement is at the heart of Nirere’s research. She works closely with residents in remote communities to gather qualitative feedback about their lived experiences, energy needs, and expectations for new electrical systems. Using machine learning techniques, she then converts this community feedback into actionable, quantitative data that can guide engineers and energy developers.
Her work contributes to broader efforts across Sub-Saharan Africa to advance clean-energy adoption and ensure that new electrical systems are functional, affordable, and responsive to local needs. The data and tools she develops help energy developers better estimate electricity demand, reduce installation costs, and design systems that communities can successfully adopt and sustain.
Nirere is advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor June Lukuyu, who is known for her work building sustainable, community-inclusive, energy systems across Africa and around the world. Nirere first met Lukuyu in June 2022 at a sustainable energy conference in Rwanda. The meeting inspired Nirere to apply to UW ECE’s doctoral program and join Lukuyu’s Interdisciplinary Energy Analytics for Society (IDEAS) Research Lab. Nirere said she found a kindred spirit and mentor in Lukuyu.
“She’s an incredible person to work with. She makes sure that you are doing projects that align with your goals, and she is really good at providing valuable feedback,” Nirere said of Lukuyu. “She’s created an open culture of learning in the IDEAS Lab. She also understands the many hurdles that international students have to overcome, and she advises us in a way that helps us to advance.”
Advancing renewable energy through mini-grid development
[caption id="attachment_40371" align="alignright" width="475"]
Nirere at a solar-powered mini-grid electrical system run by KUDURA Power in Busia County, Kenya. Her research at UW ECE is helping to inform and establish grid systems like this one, which bring clean, renewable energy to remote communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. Photo provided by Eliane Nirere.[/caption]
Nirere’s projects in the IDEAS Research Lab have been varied and include collecting data on the adoption of energy-efficient electric kettles in Kigali, Rwanda, and comparing different survey approaches for electrical demand estimation in Fiji. But her main focus as of late has been on helping to bring clean, renewable energy to remote, often rural, communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria in the form of solar-powered “mini-grid” electrical systems.
These mini-grid systems are customized to the communities in which they are built. They also operate independently from larger electrical grids that serve cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to providing clean, affordable electricity to the areas in which they are installed, they have proven to be more reliable than larger electrical grids serving the cities, which can be prone to unpredictable power outages.
“To achieve a transition to renewable energy, we will need decentralized systems, such as mini-grids, to electrify rural areas and also supplement and integrate renewable energies in the larger grids,” she said. “It’s important to note that these systems, which we optimize or develop as engineers, need to be usable and benefit the communities they serve. To achieve that, we need to include the community perspective in our planning.”
Mentorship, community outreach, and looking ahead
[caption id="attachment_40372" align="alignright" width="475"]
Nirere in the hub of a solar-powered mini-grid system run by Rafiki Power in Kibaigwa, Dodoma, Tanzania. Mini-grid systems like this one are customized to the communities in which they are built. They also operate independently from larger electrical grids that serve cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Photo provided by Eliane Nirere.[/caption]
In addition to her work in the IDEAS Research Lab and at UW ECE, Nirere is also a Graduate Fellow with the Clean Energy Institute. In this role, she works with college students in the Washington Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) program. She helps to teach the students about renewable energy systems through hands-on projects, workshops, and classroom presentations. In addition, she has advised Global Renewables Infrastructure Development (GRID), a UW student organization, on data collection and digitization methods. Nirere said she enjoys her role as a mentor.
“Electricity planning is complicated, and it brings in many different community stakeholders, such as policy makers,” Nirere said. “I’m able to share with students how you can engage with multiple stakeholders, so you can successfully deploy renewable energy systems.”
Looking ahead, one of the results Nirere is aiming to produce from her research is a tool energy developers in Africa could use to better estimate community demand for electricity. She plans to design the tool to make it easy for developers to incorporate community input into their equations. The device will employ sophisticated technologies, such as the machine learning algorithms she uses in her own work.
Nirere said she would like to stay in applied research after completing her doctoral degree, focusing on the transition to renewable energy, decarbonizing electrical grids, and providing better access to electricity for remote areas in Africa and around the world. She noted how the Vadari fellowship is giving her a boost in that direction.
“Receiving this fellowship is gratifying because it shows that there are people who see my work as valuable,” Nirere said. “Being selected means the work I’m doing resonates with them, and it validates that I am contributing to something important. It’s giving me a strong push forward.”
For more information about Eliane Nirere’s work in Africa visit the IDEAS Research Lab website.
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UW ECE alumna Thy Tran (BSEE ‘93) is the Vice President of Global Front-End Procurement at Micron Technology, a worldwide leader in the semiconductor industry. She started from humble beginnings as a Vietnamese refugee in America, but she seized every opportunity this country offered — learning, growing, and using her electrical engineering degree from the UW to build a life defined by purpose, achievement, and service. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
What does it mean to live a good life — a rich, fulfilling life? This is a question many of us wrestle with at one time or another. For UW ECE alumna Thy Tran (BSEE ‘93), it is something she has pondered for years, not just in theory, but in the way she has chosen to live. Tran’s journey began with humble beginnings as a Vietnamese refugee, arriving in America with her family and little else but hope. She seized every opportunity this country offered — learning, growing, and using her electrical engineering degree from the UW to build a life defined by purpose, achievement, and service.
[caption id="attachment_39778" align="alignright" width="461"]
Tran stands with the Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Program 2021 cohort after delivering the commencement address as the featured graduation speaker.[/caption]
Today, Tran is the Vice President of Global Front-End Procurement at Micron Technology, a worldwide leader in the semiconductor industry specializing in computer memory and storage solutions. She stands among the world’s experts in the process technology development of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, — a technology that powers countless electronic devices. Tran transitioned to her current role to learn more about the business side of semiconductors after serving as Vice President of DRAM Process Integration at Micron, where she led global teams across the United States and Asia, driving technology development and transferring advanced DRAM into high-volume manufacturing fabrication facilities. Her career spans more than three decades, with experience in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including pivotal leadership roles at two semiconductor fabrication startups.
Tran’s academic journey did not end at the UW. She is a recent alumna of the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ Executive Program and the McKinsey Executive Leadership Program. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, and a member of the Society of Women Engineers. Tran was the honored guest speaker for UW ECE’s 2025 Graduation Celebration and serves on the UW ECE Advisory Board. She is a strategic advisory board member for the International Semiconductor Executive Summit and Mercado Global, and a recipient of the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s 2023 Rising Women of Influence award. Tran will join the Micron Foundation Board of Directors in 2026. She is also an inventor holding seventeen patents and an entrepreneur who started small businesses of her own while working full time.
[caption id="attachment_39791" align="alignleft" width="456"]
Tran with her husband, Chris, and children, Maila and Thoren, in Paris, France in 2022.[/caption]
Beyond her professional accomplishments, Tran is a mother of two, a real estate investor, traveler, avid art and book lover, and a collector. Her passion for literature spans from modern fiction and poetry to English and Russian classics. Her personal library is a testament to her lifelong pursuit of knowledge and intellectual enrichment. By nearly any measure, she has achieved a life that is rich and fulfilling, and she has always managed to keep people — family, friends, colleagues — at the heart of her journey.
“I don’t define myself solely as American, Vietnamese, or an immigrant. My roots are in the people who have stood by me — my family and closest friends,” she said. “They are my foundation, the ones who keep me grounded. And for the past 20 years, my husband’s unwavering support has been my anchor through the toughest moments. At the same time, I know my life isn’t just about me. It’s part of something bigger — a network of connections and experiences that have shaped me in ways I never imagined. Every relationship, every shared moment reminds me that we’re all interconnected. Because in the end, success isn’t defined solely by what you achieve — it’s also measured by what you empower others to accomplish.”
These are the basic facts about Thy Tran, and they are impressive. Many at the UW and throughout the semiconductor industry know of her business acumen, her vast network, and her multicultural insight. But what is less well-known is the long, arduous journey she undertook to reach where she is today.
A refugee from Vietnam
[caption id="attachment_39785" align="alignleft" width="306"]
A photo of Tran holding her refugee number sign after arriving at a Thailand refugee camp in 1979.[/caption]
Tran’s father served as a colonel in the South Vietnamese military, fighting alongside U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. After the war ended, he was sentenced by the North Vietnamese government to 10 years in prison for his collaboration with the U.S. military. Recognizing the precariousness of their situation, Tran’s family decided to escape Vietnam in 1979, four years after the fall of Saigon. Tran was just 11 years old. With currency unstable, the family traded their life savings for gold bars to buy passage out of the country — a risky and complex endeavor. After two failed escape attempts, their third try was successful. Tran, her mother, stepfather, older sister, two younger brothers, and cousin boarded a boat bound for Thailand in the dead of night.
But their ordeal was far from over. The ocean was fraught with thunder, lightning, and violent storms. Armed pirates boarded their boat twice, robbing and assaulting passengers. After four days and three harrowing nights, Tran and her family arrived at a refugee camp in Thailand. There, they slept in a large tent shared with other families on the beach alongside other refugees, provided with only the barest necessities. Many found the camp to be a harsh new reality, but Tran saw it through a different lens.
“I remember the sand—smooth and white, like flour.” she recalled. “I watched the trees tilt and sway in the wind, taking it all in—the nature, the beauty—choosing to focus on that instead of the harsh reality of people surviving on bare necessities and in poor living conditions.”
[caption id="attachment_39786" align="alignright" width="290"]
Tran with her mother and sister, Linh, in Vietnam.[/caption]
Tran’s family received sponsorship from her aunt in the U.S. after a year in the refugee camp. In immigration law, sponsorship is a legally binding contract to provide financial support, ensuring newcomers will not become a public burden. Tran and her family moved from Thailand to El Paso, Texas, where they began the process of adjusting to a new culture and way of life. Tran studied English as a Second Language, or ESL, quickly becoming a translator for her family. She still remembers her first trip to an American grocery store, marveling at the beautiful, shiny fruit that was so perfectly organized. She also recalled the kindness and cruelty she encountered.
“I remember a lot of things. For instance, other kids making fun of me because I looked different, had an accent, and could not communicate well, or later being told to go back to where I came from,” she said. “But I also experienced the kindness of strangers. Looking back, all the kindness far surpassed those bad memories.”
After a year in El Paso, friends of the family who owned a restaurant encouraged the family to move to Seattle. There, Tran’s stepfather, once a lawyer in Vietnam, reskilled as an electronics technician. Her mother, a former teacher, worked in their friend’s restaurant as a cook, and later other temporary jobs. While working, she went to nursing school to get her degree as a registered nurse. She eventually held two full-time nursing jobs for fourteen years. Tran’s mother also gave birth to two more daughters in Seattle, bringing the number of children in the family to six.
[caption id="attachment_39781" align="alignleft" width="338"]
Tran with her sister, Linh, on a beach in Vietnam.[/caption]
While both parents worked, the children pitched in to help. Tran began by delivering newspapers, and soon her mother and siblings joined, managing six paper routes together. She proudly recalled earning an award from The Seattle Times for outstanding service. As she grew older, Tran balanced multiple jobs—working at McDonald’s, a community center, and even a funeral home. She also taught karate, worked as a camp counselor and receptionist, and, alongside her older sister, helped care for her younger siblings. She said these experiences fostered independence and maturity. Though her journey from stranger in a foreign land to proud American was marked by hardship, Tran said she remembered it as a magical time because she was with her family through it all.
Tran is descended from strong women who valued education. Her mother was the first woman from her village to attend a university, and her grandmother was the first girl from her village to go to school. With this lineage, it is no surprise that Tran excelled academically.
“I was always good in math and science, and they put me in the Alpha Mentor program for gifted students when I was in sixth grade,” she said. “My English was weak, but I still stood out academically. I was part of the math Olympiad and French team competitions, and we did well and received several trophies.”
Throughout high school, Tran took every opportunity she could to get involved, including playing varsity volleyball and cheerleading as well as becoming tennis captain and debate club president. Outside of school activities, she studied karate and earned her second-degree black belt, taught karate during high school and college, and even took home some trophies from the Western Regional Championship women’s competitions.
“Those recognitions taught me that success depends on your determination, effort, and abilities — not where you come from or your place in society,” she said.
From UW student to semiconductor expert
[caption id="attachment_39814" align="aligncenter" width="1135"]
Throughout high school, Tran took every opportunity she could to get involved, including playing varsity volleyball and cheerleading, as well as becoming tennis captain and debate club president. Tran was a high school homecoming queen and was involved in a number of activities outside of her classes, including studying karate and earning her second-degree black belt. (far right) Tran during the UW Kappa Delta Sorority Pledge Week 1988.[/caption]
Tran excelled in junior high and high school, advancing several grades in math. She originally aspired to become an artist, but her talent in math and science, coupled with her family’s financial need, led a school counselor to advise her to pursue engineering. Tran took the advice, was accepted into the UW, and attended the University on a full-ride scholarship.
She flourished at the UW, joining the Kappa Delta Sorority and serving as scholarship chairman and Kappa Delta class president. She applied herself diligently to rigorous electrical engineering studies. She also took courses in philosophy and English literature to broaden her horizons. Yet, during her first years of undergraduate study, she struggled with regrets about giving up art, which made her engineering studies more challenging.
“To me, the best part is more about enjoying the journey — the friends you meet and the deep bonds you form, how you get there and how you grow and learn along the way.” — Thy Tran, UW ECE alumna (BSEE '93)
[caption id="attachment_39797" align="alignright" width="550"]
Tran was among several industry leaders at the 30th Anniversary of the Global Semiconductor Alliance Awards, where the GSA rang the closing bell at the NASDAQ Stock Market on November 14, 2024.[/caption]
Everything changed the summer of her sophomore year, when she took a solo backpacking trip across Europe. The trip opened her eyes to art, architecture, history, and a world full of possibilities. She realized that to travel and immerse herself in rich, cultural experiences, she needed to be able to support that lifestyle. Rather than continuing to worry about “selling out,” she decided to embrace electrical engineering and her natural talent in math and science, recognizing that this was the ticket to living her best life. This mindset shift changed everything.
“For me, mindset can determine skill set,” she said. “If you have the right mindset — mental toughness, perseverance, and tenacity — the skill set is easier to acquire.”
After returning to the UW, Tran’s engineering studies began to come easily to her. She took a semiconductor physics course at UW ECE that became an inflection point. Tran said she found it fascinating, and as she called it, “the magic of semiconductors” landed her an internship at IBM, setting the stage for her future career.
A leader in DRAM technology
[caption id="attachment_39796" align="alignright" width="413"]
Micron’s HBM4 is a third-generation, high-bandwidth memory cube, an example of Micron’s industry products enabled by DRAM technology. This product is designed to accelerate next- generation AI platforms by providing higher speeds, increased capacity, and better power efficiency.[/caption]
Tran’s first job after graduation was at Motorola in Austin, Texas, working on process technology for microprocessors and static random access memory, or SRAM, as a device engineer. After three and a half years at Motorola, her curiosity and desire to explore the world led her to Siemens, where she joined the company’s International Technology Transfer Management team. Tran played a key role in the ProMOS semiconductor manufacturing fab startup — a joint venture between Siemens and Mosel Vitelic — transferring DRAM technology from research and development to manufacturing.
“To me, the best part is more about enjoying the journey — the friends you meet and the deep bonds you form, how you get there and how you grow and learn along the way,” she said. “It’s also about taking stock of the path you are on, your efforts, your resilience, and the people who helped you or inspired you.”
From 1996 to 2008, Tran worked in the United States, Europe, and Asia, leading innovative and entrepreneurial projects. In 1997, she was part of the WaferTech startup team, a company now known as TSMC Washington in Camas, Washington. Two years later, she returned to Siemens, which spun off Infineon in Richmond, Virginia. At Infineon, which later spun off to Qimonda for the Memory sector, Tran advanced to the Technical Ladder Program as Principal Engineer and Overall Integration Leader. In 2004, she relocated to the company’s memory research and development headquarters in Dresden, Germany, to lead DRAM technology node development.
[caption id="attachment_39756" align="alignleft" width="337"]
A silicon wafer containing hundreds of microchips produced by Micron.[/caption]
In 2008, Tran joined Micron, where she thrived and rose through the ranks—leading DRAM module development programs that included advanced capacitor, metallization, and through-silicon-via (TSV) process integration—before assuming the role of DRAM Process Integration node lead for several technology generations. Tran later oversaw teams across the U.S., Taiwan, and Japan. Her technical contributions and leadership have been pivotal to Micron’s DRAM technology development, helping the company achieve industry leadership in DRAM technology.
Tran is a steadfast innovator. Her inventions and patent disclosures have advanced semiconductor fabrication techniques, enabling more efficient and reliable memory devices. Her work has addressed critical challenges in miniaturization and performance optimization for modern electronics, including low-capacitance interconnect structures, advanced planarization techniques, and vertically integrated DRAM architectures. Collectively, her innovations have pushed the boundaries of semiconductor scaling, enabling smaller, faster, and more power-efficient consumer electronics.
“To continue scaling DRAM technology, we must keep pushing the limits of physics. That means being creative and innovative—finding new ways to enable the next generation of memory. It also requires making tough, sometimes risky decisions: setting the right strategy, balancing incremental improvements with disruptive changes, and ensuring robust risk mitigations to cover all bases.”
[caption id="attachment_39799" align="aligncenter" width="1201"]
Tran was the recipient of the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s 2023 Women of Influence award. She is pictured here at the award celebration with Micron’s CEO and executives.[/caption]
Tran is also a fearless leader who knows how to motivate her team and stand up for them when needed. When she joined Micron, the company was behind its competitors in DRAM development. Tran rose through the ranks, assuming more leadership roles and responsibilities. Before long, she was leading the company’s DRAM Process Integration organization in Technology Development. Micron went from fast follower to industry leader within a few DRAM generations. Tran believes that a winning mindset was key to her team’s success, just as it had been for her as a UW undergraduate.
“Yesterday’s best is not good enough for tomorrow. So, you must be maniacal, and drive with a ‘what is possible’ mindset instead of just doing what you can to get by,” she said. “I always say, ‘go big or go home.’ Sometimes we bet wrong, but if you mitigate the risk, you will still come out on top — that is part of strategic and technical leadership.”
A lifelong learner
[caption id="attachment_39789" align="alignright" width="334"]
Tran was the honored guest speaker for UW ECE’s 2025 Graduation Celebration, and she serves on the UW ECE Advisory Board. Her nephew was in the 2025 graduating class, and three generations of Tran’s family attended the ceremony. Photo by Tara Brown.[/caption]
Tran was invited to be the honored guest speaker for the UW ECE 2025 Graduation Ceremony. At the event, she noted that her nephew was in the graduating class, and she was visibly moved when speaking about her family. Three generations of Tran’s family attended the ceremony. All six of her siblings graduated from the UW, as did three nieces and her nephew. In total, they are, according to Tran, “10 proud Huskies!”. Through talent, determination, and the support of family, friends, and colleagues, this former Vietnamese refugee and her family, which now includes doctors, engineers, a researcher, and an economist are making significant contributions to America and society.
“I felt deeply humbled and grateful to be invited as the honored speaker. To me, it is a testament to the University’s values, reflected in the speaker profiles UW ECE chooses to showcase,” she said. “For me, it was a true homecoming, and it just filled my heart with tremendous pride and joy.”
Tran is focused on giving back to the next generation through mentorship at both the UW and Micron. She has served on the UW ECE Advisory Board for several years, bringing industry experience, insights, and connections to maximize opportunities for students and faculty. She is working with UW ECE to set up semiconductor fabrication facility site visits and is coordinating with Micron’s design and products team to provide more opportunities for students in the UW ECE Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or ENGINE, capstone program. At Micron, Tran has been the executive sponsor for the Women Leadership network, or MWLN, for several tenures and an active mentor for multiple programs, including MWLN, the Technical Leadership Program, Micron Young Professionals, and the Global Mentorship Program for external university students. She is a popular mentor with a long wait list of mentees.
“I felt deeply humbled and grateful to be invited as the honored speaker. To me, it is a testament to the University’s values, reflected in the speaker profiles UW ECE chooses to showcase. For me, it was a true homecoming, and it just filled my heart with tremendous pride and joy.” — Thy Tran
In October 2025, Tran delivered the closing keynote — Dream Big. Live Large. Give Back. — at the Society of Women Engineers’ WE25 conference in New Orleans, leaving thousands of attendees deeply moved. Tran received a standing ovation and sparked a wave of LinkedIn posts celebrating the power and authenticity of her story. Her message went beyond inspiration, igniting meaningful conversations about courage, leadership, and the limitless possibilities ahead.
And she continues to be a lifelong learner.
[caption id="attachment_39813" align="alignleft" width="567"]
(left) Tran on the day of achieving the rank of second-degree black belt in karate while at the UW. (right) Tran’s oil-on-canvas study — an homage to French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, painted during her art school days.[/caption]
Over the years, Tran has studied painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, rare books at the University of Virginia, and explored other martial arts, including Kung Fu and Taekwondo, even while working as a full-time engineer. Her passion for knowledge and new experiences continues today. Recently, she was accepted into UC Berkeley’s full-time master’s degree program in information and data science, with an emphasis in artificial intelligence (AI). Tran says Micron and her own organization within the company have ambitious AI roadmaps with numerous initiatives underway. She felt that if she understood data science and AI at a deeper level, she could more effectively lead and coach her team. She also said that it is simply exhilarating to learn new things.
“I don’t do things only because they are necessary to advance. I choose the hard things because they stretch me — technically, intellectually — and because in the long run, they broaden my knowledge and perspective,” she reflected. “I can hang with engineers and artists, literary geeks, food and wine enthusiasts, political junkies, and world travelers. Being well-rounded doesn’t just enrich my life, but also others’ — it helps me connect with others with diverse backgrounds to form meaningful and lasting friendships. Most people go through life anchored in a single version of themselves. Every challenge we embrace, every curiosity we follow, uncovers another layer of who we are and who we might become.”
Epilogue: The many versions of a life well-lived
Thy Tran’s journey is a testament to the power of resilience, curiosity, and the courage to embrace possibility. From a refugee camp in Thailand to the global stage of semiconductor innovation, she has lived out answers to the question: What does it mean to live a rich, fulfilling life? From Tran’s experience, it means embracing opportunity, lifting others as you rise, and never ceasing to learn and grow. Her story is not just about achievement — it is about transformation, about the many versions of ourselves waiting to be discovered, and about the beauty of building bridges across cultures and generations.
[caption id="attachment_39812" align="aligncenter" width="1205"]
Tran with three generations of her extended family, attending her brother Phuc’s wedding in Jamaica in 2014.[/caption]
See more photos of Thy Tran in this year's issue of The Integrator magazine.
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[caption id="attachment_40966" align="alignright" width="600"] A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical microchip that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable photonic integrated circuit (closeup shown above) could be used in a wide range of applications, including information processing, sensing, imaging, and artificial intelligence. Photo by Jayita Dutta.[/caption]
As technology advances, and the demand for faster, higher-bandwidth, and more energy-efficient data processing continues to grow, scientists and engineers search for ways to improve electronic systems. One avenue they have been exploring is optoelectronics — the study and application of electronic devices that interface with light by detecting, emitting, or converting it into electrical signals. Optoelectronics offers significant advantages over conventional electronics, including faster speed, higher bandwidth, lower power consumption, and improved reliability.
One particularly promising direction in optoelectronics has been the development of the photonic integrated circuit — an optical microchip that uses light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) to sense, process, and transmit information. These optical chips are already being used in many advanced technologies today, such as high-speed fiber-optic communications, data center interconnects, sensors for autonomous vehicles, and hardware accelerators for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Despite these advantages, photonic integrated circuits present a major challenge: each optoelectronic application requires a separate photonic integrated circuit design, much like application-specific integrated circuits, or ASIC chips for conventional electronics. This lengthens the prototyping cycle and increases costs. As a result, engineers have been developing programmable photonic integrated circuits, which enable the circuit to be reconfigured by users after manufacturing to perform specific, customized computational and signal-processing tasks. This type of circuit is an optical counterpart to the more commonly known electronic field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, which is used in many of today’s high-performance and advanced technologies.
However, programmable photonic integrated circuits present their own challenges. Many consume significant power, occupy large physical footprints, and suffer from unwanted heat transfer in densely packed systems. High power demand arises because most optical chips require a constant flow of electricity, even during static operation. These limitations have slowed the adoption of programmable photonics beyond specialized research environments.
[caption id="attachment_40968" align="alignleft" width="450"] UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar (left) and UW ECE alumnus Rui Chen (Ph.D. ECE ‘25, right), who was the lead author of the Science Advances paper. Chen is a postdoctoral research associate in the Photonics Materials Lab at MIT, and he was a doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when this research took place. Photo of Majumdar by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE.[/caption]
Now, as described in the journal Science Advances, a research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical chip — a programmable photonic integrated circuit that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable microchip addresses issues with device footprint and heat transfers by using phase change materials — a technology that consumes no static power. The chip has the potential to be applied in a wide range of technologies, including information processing, sensing, imaging, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
“This optical chip could help to accelerate the prototyping cycle while reducing power consumption for applications like AI computing. Our study is also the first time someone has shown that these kinds of optical circuits can be controlled with electrical signals, reliably and very accurately,” said lead author and UW ECE alumnus Rui Chen (Ph.D. ECE ‘25). Chen is a postdoctoral research associate in the Photonics Materials Lab at MIT, and he was a doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when the bulk of this research took place. He added, “We built our circuit using common foundry processes, which demonstrates the scalability of the system.”
Chen and Majumdar’s research team fabricated their chip in the Washington Nanofabrication Facility, on silicon wafers provided by Intel Corporation. Intel and the National Science Foundation’s Future of Semiconductors Program provided funding and support for the work, which took place over the last four years in Majumdar’s lab and at the WNF. Other team members included UW ECE doctoral students Andrew Tang, Jayita Dutta, and Virat Tara as well as UW alumni Julian Ye (BS Physics ‘25) and Zhuoran Fang (Ph.D. EE ‘23).
Low power, reconfigurable, scalable
A key advantage of the team’s optical chip is that it consumes substantially less power than its counterparts. It accomplishes this by using phase-change materials to store, process, and transmit data. Phase-change materials, which are used to house data on CDs and DVDs, can contain information in a stable, “nonvolatile” state, requiring little to no power to do so. Until now, the challenge with using phase-change materials in programmable photonic integrated circuits has been optical loss and data bit precision, but Majumdar and Chen’s team found ways to address both of those issues.
“Typical ways of building optical circuits require you to input constant power into your system. That’s problematic for a lot of applications that require reconfiguration of the circuit, such as artificial intelligence,” Chen said. “Here, we’ve created a system you can change and leave in place without any power supply, and it maintains its state by itself.”
This optical chip can also be reconfigured, or reprogrammed, by the user for multiple applications. Chen said he saw this chip as a platform for enabling a wide range of technologies, especially high-demand, complex computation applications, such as training neural networks in artificial intelligence. And because the research team has demonstrated the scalability of the circuit by fabricating it using conventional foundry processes, this chip is on a trajectory to move from the lab into the real world.
Looking ahead
This ongoing work highlights the growing role of UW ECE in advancing scalable optoelectronic technologies, but Chen noted that there is still more research and development to do before their optical chip will be ready for the marketplace. The UW and MIT are working together on this long-term effort, and Chen intends to continue his collaboration with Majumdar.
“An important next step is to test this optical chip in some real applications,” Chen said. “We’d like to put this circuit in application scenarios, such as AI computing, optical switches in data center infrastructure, and optical sensing.”
Another upcoming project will be for the team to build a larger-scale optoelectronic system containing the optical chip. This system will include the chip, an electrical control board, and automated algorithms. Chen said that he and Majumdar will also be working on increasing the speed and number of times the phase-change materials in the circuit can be switched from one state to another. This impacts the types of applications the chip might be a good fit for.
“This new optical chip provides a pretty powerful platform for the advancement of optoelectronics in the sense that it can promise a larger-scale system, it doesn’t need a complicated control scheme, and it doesn’t require static power,” Chen said. “Those factors, taken together, promise scalable optical systems, which eventually could lead to lower power consumption and reduced cost for many advanced applications and technologies coming online today.”
For more information about this research, read “NEO-PGA: Nonvolatile electro-optically programmable gate array” in Science Advances.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_40966" align="alignright" width="600"] A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical microchip that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable photonic integrated circuit (closeup shown above) could be used in a wide range of applications, including information processing, sensing, imaging, and artificial intelligence. Photo by Jayita Dutta.[/caption]
As technology advances, and the demand for faster, higher-bandwidth, and more energy-efficient data processing continues to grow, scientists and engineers search for ways to improve electronic systems. One avenue they have been exploring is optoelectronics — the study and application of electronic devices that interface with light by detecting, emitting, or converting it into electrical signals. Optoelectronics offers significant advantages over conventional electronics, including faster speed, higher bandwidth, lower power consumption, and improved reliability.
One particularly promising direction in optoelectronics has been the development of the photonic integrated circuit — an optical microchip that uses light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) to sense, process, and transmit information. These optical chips are already being used in many advanced technologies today, such as high-speed fiber-optic communications, data center interconnects, sensors for autonomous vehicles, and hardware accelerators for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Despite these advantages, photonic integrated circuits present a major challenge: each optoelectronic application requires a separate photonic integrated circuit design, much like application-specific integrated circuits, or ASIC chips for conventional electronics. This lengthens the prototyping cycle and increases costs. As a result, engineers have been developing programmable photonic integrated circuits, which enable the circuit to be reconfigured by users after manufacturing to perform specific, customized computational and signal-processing tasks. This type of circuit is an optical counterpart to the more commonly known electronic field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, which is used in many of today’s high-performance and advanced technologies.
However, programmable photonic integrated circuits present their own challenges. Many consume significant power, occupy large physical footprints, and suffer from unwanted heat transfer in densely packed systems. High power demand arises because most optical chips require a constant flow of electricity, even during static operation. These limitations have slowed the adoption of programmable photonics beyond specialized research environments.
[caption id="attachment_40968" align="alignleft" width="450"] UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar (left) and UW ECE alumnus Rui Chen (Ph.D. ECE ‘25, right), who was the lead author of the Science Advances paper. Chen is a postdoctoral research associate in the Photonics Materials Lab at MIT, and he was a doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when this research took place. Photo of Majumdar by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE.[/caption]
Now, as described in the journal Science Advances, a research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has engineered a new type of optical chip — a programmable photonic integrated circuit that is low power, electrically reconfigurable, and can be mass-produced. This programmable microchip addresses issues with device footprint and heat transfers by using phase change materials — a technology that consumes no static power. The chip has the potential to be applied in a wide range of technologies, including information processing, sensing, imaging, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
“This optical chip could help to accelerate the prototyping cycle while reducing power consumption for applications like AI computing. Our study is also the first time someone has shown that these kinds of optical circuits can be controlled with electrical signals, reliably and very accurately,” said lead author and UW ECE alumnus Rui Chen (Ph.D. ECE ‘25). Chen is a postdoctoral research associate in the Photonics Materials Lab at MIT, and he was a doctoral student in Majumdar’s lab when the bulk of this research took place. He added, “We built our circuit using common foundry processes, which demonstrates the scalability of the system.”
Chen and Majumdar’s research team fabricated their chip in the Washington Nanofabrication Facility, on silicon wafers provided by Intel Corporation. Intel and the National Science Foundation’s Future of Semiconductors Program provided funding and support for the work, which took place over the last four years in Majumdar’s lab and at the WNF. Other team members included UW ECE doctoral students Andrew Tang, Jayita Dutta, and Virat Tara as well as UW alumni Julian Ye (BS Physics ‘25) and Zhuoran Fang (Ph.D. EE ‘23).
Low power, reconfigurable, scalable
A key advantage of the team’s optical chip is that it consumes substantially less power than its counterparts. It accomplishes this by using phase-change materials to store, process, and transmit data. Phase-change materials, which are used to house data on CDs and DVDs, can contain information in a stable, “nonvolatile” state, requiring little to no power to do so. Until now, the challenge with using phase-change materials in programmable photonic integrated circuits has been optical loss and data bit precision, but Majumdar and Chen’s team found ways to address both of those issues.
“Typical ways of building optical circuits require you to input constant power into your system. That’s problematic for a lot of applications that require reconfiguration of the circuit, such as artificial intelligence,” Chen said. “Here, we’ve created a system you can change and leave in place without any power supply, and it maintains its state by itself.”
This optical chip can also be reconfigured, or reprogrammed, by the user for multiple applications. Chen said he saw this chip as a platform for enabling a wide range of technologies, especially high-demand, complex computation applications, such as training neural networks in artificial intelligence. And because the research team has demonstrated the scalability of the circuit by fabricating it using conventional foundry processes, this chip is on a trajectory to move from the lab into the real world.
Looking ahead
This ongoing work highlights the growing role of UW ECE in advancing scalable optoelectronic technologies, but Chen noted that there is still more research and development to do before their optical chip will be ready for the marketplace. The UW and MIT are working together on this long-term effort, and Chen intends to continue his collaboration with Majumdar.
“An important next step is to test this optical chip in some real applications,” Chen said. “We’d like to put this circuit in application scenarios, such as AI computing, optical switches in data center infrastructure, and optical sensing.”
Another upcoming project will be for the team to build a larger-scale optoelectronic system containing the optical chip. This system will include the chip, an electrical control board, and automated algorithms. Chen said that he and Majumdar will also be working on increasing the speed and number of times the phase-change materials in the circuit can be switched from one state to another. This impacts the types of applications the chip might be a good fit for.
“This new optical chip provides a pretty powerful platform for the advancement of optoelectronics in the sense that it can promise a larger-scale system, it doesn’t need a complicated control scheme, and it doesn’t require static power,” Chen said. “Those factors, taken together, promise scalable optical systems, which eventually could lead to lower power consumption and reduced cost for many advanced applications and technologies coming online today.”
For more information about this research, read “NEO-PGA: Nonvolatile electro-optically programmable gate array” in Science Advances.
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[post_title] => At quantum testbed lab, researchers across the UW probe ‘spooky’ mysteries of quantum phenomena
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_40646" align="alignright" width="600"] A research team led by UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden has applied game theory to create a new computational framework for designing neural interfaces that adapt to the user. Their work offers a new, principled approach to improving human-machine interaction. Shown above: An experiment participant uses their forearm muscle contractions, with help from a neural interface, to move a cursor (blue dot) toward a target (red dot) onscreen. Photo courtesy of Maneeshika Madduri.[/caption]
There is an exciting future on the horizon — one in which your thoughts could directly control electronic devices you use every day. In many ways, that future is already here, enabled by neural interfaces — engineered devices designed to exchange information with the body’s nervous system. From consumer wearables to clinical devices, electronics controlled by neural interfaces are making their way into the marketplace and medical practice. These technologies are demonstrating potential for augmenting, and even restoring, human capabilities in profound ways.
For example, electroencephalogram (EEG) headbands, such as Muse and Neurosity Crown, are being used to help people improve mental focus. Electromyography (EMG) wristbands, such as the Meta Neural Band and the Mudra Band for the Apple Watch, can enable hands-free control of electronic devices through subtle finger movements. And implantable neural interfaces, such as the Synchron Stenrode and Neuralink’s Telepathy chip, are allowing paralyzed patients to use neural impulses to control computers, digital devices, and robotic limbs.
But despite these remarkable advances, there is still much work to be done to optimize these technologies and make them useful for large numbers of people. One of the most significant barriers is that neural interfaces need to be customized to some degree for each individual user — because no two brains or bodies are exactly alike.
Customizing the control of a neural interface for the unique brain of each user is advantageous for ensuring desired outcomes and reliable performance. When considering the vast diversity of human nervous systems and the scale required for real-world deployment of this technology, it becomes clear how daunting this challenge can be for scientists and engineers.
To help address this challenge, UW ECE professors Amy Orsborn and Sam Burden are working together to build a strong foundation for engineers developing neural interfaces that can learn from and adapt to individual users.
“Before this study, we couldn’t design co-adaptive neural interfaces from any sort of principled approach. It was always ad hoc. But now, if engineers are designing a system where they anticipate learning on the part of the user and in the neural interface, they will have a framework they can use to design that system.”
— Amy Orsborn, Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering
In a recent paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, Orsborn, Burden, and their research team describe a new computational framework for neural interface design that is based in large part on game theory, the mathematical study of strategic interactions among rational decision-makers. In this setting, the “decision-makers” are the human user and the adaptive algorithms embedded within the neural interface itself. And the “game” isn’t about competition — it’s about cooperation. Both the human user and the neural interface continually adjust their strategies, learning from each other to improve performance over time.
[caption id="attachment_40661" align="alignleft" width="600"] Amy Orsborn (left), a Chern Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering and Sam Burden (right), a UW ECE associate professor. Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
“This study is perhaps the first to bring game theory, and to a lesser extent, control theory, into neural engineering,” Orsborn said. “It’s one of a very small subset of studies that are trying to use those kinds of computational and mathematical frameworks for this setting.”
Orsborn is a well-known leader in the field of neural engineering, working at the intersection of engineering and neuroscience to develop therapeutic neural interfaces for restoration and rehabilitation of human sensorimotor capabilities. She is a Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor in UW ECE and the UW Department of Bioengineering as well as a faculty member of the Center for Neurotechnology at the UW. She also serves as a scientific adviser for Meta Reality Labs.
Burden is a UW ECE associate professor known for his work discovering and formalizing principles of human sensorimotor control, focusing on applications in robotics, neural engineering, and human-AI interaction.
“The basic idea we had was that game theory could be the right computational framework to get predictions for what the outcome of interactions between the user and the neural interface might be and then be able to shape those outcomes toward a desired end state and better performance,” Burden said. “For example, in a rehabilitation setting, you could design a neural interface that elicits movement or muscle activity that otherwise might be hard to command or instruct somebody to do.”
Developing mathematical and computational frameworks for neural interface design is a long-term effort. Orsborn and Burden said they anticipate continuing this line of research for several years and widening their collaboration to involve other UW ECE faculty.
In this study, their research team was a cross-disciplinary group of UW graduate and undergraduate students. The group included the paper’s lead author and UW ECE alumna Maneeshika Madduri (Ph.D. ECE ‘24), who was a doctoral student at the time the research took place. UW ECE alumna Momona Yamagami (Ph.D. EE ‘22), also a doctoral student at the time of the study, co-authored the paper along with bioengineering doctoral student Si Jia Li and UW alumnus Sasha Burckhardt (B.S. in Neuroscience ‘23), who was an undergraduate student during the study. Orsborn and Burden were senior authors providing oversight and guidance for the research and experiments that took place in their labs.
From theory to practice — an experimental validation
[caption id="attachment_40649" align="alignright" width="600"] In the research team's experiment, the participant wears a strip of EMG electrodes on their forearm, secured by tape. The electrodes record muscle activity and send this information to a data processor and an adaptive, algorithmic decoder. The decoder output determines cursor velocity that is then integrated into the system to display cursor position onscreen. Together, the EMG electrode strip, the data processor, and the algorithmic decoder make up the neural interface. Illustration provided by Maneeshika Madduri.[/caption]
Besides bringing game theory into neural engineering, another thing that made this study unique was the inclusion of an experiment that demonstrated and validated the computational framework developed by the research team. In the experiment, the human participant attempts to control a cursor and follow a target onscreen, using muscle contractions in their forearm. The participant wears a strip of EMG electrodes on the surface of their forearm skin, secured by tape. The electrodes record muscle activity and send this information to a data processor and an adaptive, algorithmic decoder. The decoder output determines cursor velocity that is then integrated into the system to display cursor position onscreen. Together, the EMG electrode strip, the data processor, and the algorithmic decoder make up the neural interface.
This experiment took place in a closed-loop system, considered as such because the human participant sees the cursor and target onscreen and converts what they see into neural signals that travel to their arm, resulting in muscle contractions and electrical signals from motor neurons in the forearm. Those signals are then picked up by the EMG electrodes and sent to the data processor and adaptive decoder, which then resets the cursor position onscreen, closing the information loop.
The neural interface was also considered to be co-adaptive. This is because both the human participant and the algorithms in the neural interface are learning and adapting alongside each other, seeking to accomplish the task and optimize performance together.
"We’re doing human-centered engineering, as opposed to just making a device and then requiring the user to adapt to it. Here, we’re making devices that adapt to you.” — UW ECE Associate Professor Sam Burden
This experiment validated the research team’s new computational framework for closed-loop, co-adaptive neural interfaces, allowing researchers to predict how algorithmic changes would impact the neural interface performance and revealing how various properties of the interface itself could shape or nudge user behavior toward better performance or preferred outcomes.
“Before this study, we couldn’t design co-adaptive neural interfaces from any sort of principled approach. It was always ad hoc,” Orsborn said. “But now, if engineers are designing a system where they anticipate learning on the part of the user and in the neural interface, they will have a framework they can use to design that system.”
What’s next for neural interfaces at UW ECE
[caption id="attachment_40651" align="alignright" width="600"] A view of the EMG electrode strip used by the research team. Photo provided by Maneeshika Madduri.[/caption]
Next steps for Orsborn and Burden include continuing to build on the computational framework they have developed by testing more machine learning and AI algorithms that lead to distinct, measurable outcomes within the context of neural interface design. They also have discussed bringing AI into the system loop in a more substantive way to enable more intelligent customization of the user experience.
UW ECE has several faculty members who engage in neural engineering research, so Orsborn and Burden are already planning to bring their work on mathematical and computational frameworks for neural interface design to other collaborative projects within the Department. Burden is putting together projects and proposals with UW ECE professors Lillian Ratliff, Kim Ingraham, and Yiyue Luo to further develop these frameworks and apply the research to exoskeletons and wearable technologies. Orsborn is looking forward to building on her current collaboration with UW ECE Associate Professor Eli Shlizerman, who holds a joint appointment in applied mathematics. They are currently conducting studies modeling how a person’s brain changes while using a neural interface.
Orsborn and Burden both said that they were enthusiastic about what the future holds as they build out this body of research in collaborative ways.
“I’m really excited about the future directions that this research opens up — the possibility that we can design these systems to shape positive outcomes for people,” Orsborn said. “That has a huge range of potential applications, which are all very much new and to be explored in how useful or productive they will be, but that’s what gets me really excited because it opens a lot of new doors for exploration.”
Burden added, “I’d also like people to know that we’re doing human-centered engineering, as opposed to just making a device and then requiring the user to adapt to it. Here, we’re making devices that adapt to you.”
Learn more about this topic in the article, “Computational framework to predict and shape human-machine interactions in closed-loop, co-adaptive neural interfaces,” in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. Research funding was provided by Meta Reality Labs Research and the National Science Foundation.
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[caption id="attachment_40369" align="alignright" width="575"] UW ECE doctoral student Eliane Nirere has received a 2026 fellowship award from the Sarala Vadari Endowed Fund in Electrical & Computer Engineering. The award honors her academic achievements and research aimed at bringing electricity and renewable energy to remote, underserved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Photo by Digitec Studios in Rwanda.[/caption]
This academic quarter, UW ECE doctoral student Eliane Nirere received a 2026 fellowship award from the Sarala Vadari Endowed Fund in Electrical & Computer Engineering — a fund established at UW ECE to foster advanced education in Power and Energy Systems. Each year, the fund recognizes an exceptional UW ECE graduate student in this field of study. This year’s fellowship award honors Nirere’s academic achievements and her research aimed at bringing electricity and renewable energy to remote, underserved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“This fellowship means a lot to me, and it came to the right person at the right time. It has helped me to extend my working hours and be able to devote more time to my research,” Nirere said. “The funding from the Vadari fellowship is helping me to achieve more, and it is contributing to research that is making change for people who need it.”
A personal mission shaped by experience
Nirere was born and raised in Rwanda, where she saw firsthand how a lack of electricity affects education, health, and economic opportunity. As a child, she wanted to help address the problem, even though she did not yet know what the solution could be. In school, she excelled in math and physics. So, at the university level, she decided to major in engineering, hoping to work in one of the local utilities on the technical side of electricity generation.
“To achieve a transition to renewable energy, we will need decentralized systems, such as mini-grids, to electrify rural areas and also supplement and integrate renewable energies in the larger grids. It’s important to note that these systems, which we optimize or develop as engineers, need to be usable and benefit the communities they serve. To achieve that, we need to include the community perspective in our planning.” — UW ECE doctoral student Eliane Nirere
In 2020, she received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical and energy engineering from the University of Rwanda. She went on to pursue graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University Africa, where, in 2022, she graduated with a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering with a concentration in power and energy systems.
“During my graduate studies, I was exposed to renewable energy research and how it could help bring electricity to people in rural and remote areas,” she said. “I was really moved by that experience and inspired and eager to join other people involved in this work.”
Nirere came to UW ECE in 2023 to pursue her doctoral degree. Since then, she has divided her time between research in the lab and leading data collection projects in Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. Nirere works closely with small communities in these countries to ensure their voices are heard in the complex process of building electrical grids and systems based on renewable energy. She uses machine learning techniques to incorporate community input into electrification planning, which helps ensure that the systems built closely match the needs and expectations of the people for which they are intended to serve.
“We hope that this award will encourage other outstanding students like Eliane to come to the UW to complete their doctoral degree here, and like Eliane, do research for the betterment of all,” said UW ECE alumnus and Affiliate Professor Subramanian (Mani) Vadari (MSEE ‘86, Ph.D. EE ‘91).
Vadari, along with his brother, Viswanathan (Vish) Vadari, and their sister, Meenakshi Ganesh, created the Sarala Vadari Endowed Fund in Electrical & Computer Engineering in 2013 to honor their mother — Vadari Sarala Ramachandran. According to Mani Vadari, she had many roles in life, including wife, mother, teacher, friend, mentor, chef extraordinaire, artist, role model, and problem solver. He said that his mother’s larger-than-life personality was instrumental in his and his siblings’ development as successful educators and engineers.
Mani Vadari is an IEEE Life Fellow as well as the founder and president of Modern Grid Solutions, a consulting firm that advises electric utilities and vendors on smart grid technologies, renewable energy integration, and modernizing electrical systems. In addition to his affiliation with UW ECE, he is also an adjunct professor at Washington State University. Vish Vadari is a Global Senior Technology Specialist at ZF Automotive and is a recognized expert in the field of acoustics, vibrations, and noise abatement. Meenakshi Ganesh is a former high school teacher, who is retired and living in Chennai, India.
Community engagement that benefits electrification planning
[caption id="attachment_40392" align="alignright" width="475"] Nirere (right) with her adviser, UW ECE Assistant Professor June Lukuyu, in the IDEAS Research Lab. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Community engagement is at the heart of Nirere’s research. She works closely with residents in remote communities to gather qualitative feedback about their lived experiences, energy needs, and expectations for new electrical systems. Using machine learning techniques, she then converts this community feedback into actionable, quantitative data that can guide engineers and energy developers.
Her work contributes to broader efforts across Sub-Saharan Africa to advance clean-energy adoption and ensure that new electrical systems are functional, affordable, and responsive to local needs. The data and tools she develops help energy developers better estimate electricity demand, reduce installation costs, and design systems that communities can successfully adopt and sustain.
Nirere is advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor June Lukuyu, who is known for her work building sustainable, community-inclusive, energy systems across Africa and around the world. Nirere first met Lukuyu in June 2022 at a sustainable energy conference in Rwanda. The meeting inspired Nirere to apply to UW ECE’s doctoral program and join Lukuyu’s Interdisciplinary Energy Analytics for Society (IDEAS) Research Lab. Nirere said she found a kindred spirit and mentor in Lukuyu.
“She’s an incredible person to work with. She makes sure that you are doing projects that align with your goals, and she is really good at providing valuable feedback,” Nirere said of Lukuyu. “She’s created an open culture of learning in the IDEAS Lab. She also understands the many hurdles that international students have to overcome, and she advises us in a way that helps us to advance.”
Advancing renewable energy through mini-grid development
[caption id="attachment_40371" align="alignright" width="475"] Nirere at a solar-powered mini-grid electrical system run by KUDURA Power in Busia County, Kenya. Her research at UW ECE is helping to inform and establish grid systems like this one, which bring clean, renewable energy to remote communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. Photo provided by Eliane Nirere.[/caption]
Nirere’s projects in the IDEAS Research Lab have been varied and include collecting data on the adoption of energy-efficient electric kettles in Kigali, Rwanda, and comparing different survey approaches for electrical demand estimation in Fiji. But her main focus as of late has been on helping to bring clean, renewable energy to remote, often rural, communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria in the form of solar-powered “mini-grid” electrical systems.
These mini-grid systems are customized to the communities in which they are built. They also operate independently from larger electrical grids that serve cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to providing clean, affordable electricity to the areas in which they are installed, they have proven to be more reliable than larger electrical grids serving the cities, which can be prone to unpredictable power outages.
“To achieve a transition to renewable energy, we will need decentralized systems, such as mini-grids, to electrify rural areas and also supplement and integrate renewable energies in the larger grids,” she said. “It’s important to note that these systems, which we optimize or develop as engineers, need to be usable and benefit the communities they serve. To achieve that, we need to include the community perspective in our planning.”
Mentorship, community outreach, and looking ahead
[caption id="attachment_40372" align="alignright" width="475"] Nirere in the hub of a solar-powered mini-grid system run by Rafiki Power in Kibaigwa, Dodoma, Tanzania. Mini-grid systems like this one are customized to the communities in which they are built. They also operate independently from larger electrical grids that serve cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Photo provided by Eliane Nirere.[/caption]
In addition to her work in the IDEAS Research Lab and at UW ECE, Nirere is also a Graduate Fellow with the Clean Energy Institute. In this role, she works with college students in the Washington Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) program. She helps to teach the students about renewable energy systems through hands-on projects, workshops, and classroom presentations. In addition, she has advised Global Renewables Infrastructure Development (GRID), a UW student organization, on data collection and digitization methods. Nirere said she enjoys her role as a mentor.
“Electricity planning is complicated, and it brings in many different community stakeholders, such as policy makers,” Nirere said. “I’m able to share with students how you can engage with multiple stakeholders, so you can successfully deploy renewable energy systems.”
Looking ahead, one of the results Nirere is aiming to produce from her research is a tool energy developers in Africa could use to better estimate community demand for electricity. She plans to design the tool to make it easy for developers to incorporate community input into their equations. The device will employ sophisticated technologies, such as the machine learning algorithms she uses in her own work.
Nirere said she would like to stay in applied research after completing her doctoral degree, focusing on the transition to renewable energy, decarbonizing electrical grids, and providing better access to electricity for remote areas in Africa and around the world. She noted how the Vadari fellowship is giving her a boost in that direction.
“Receiving this fellowship is gratifying because it shows that there are people who see my work as valuable,” Nirere said. “Being selected means the work I’m doing resonates with them, and it validates that I am contributing to something important. It’s giving me a strong push forward.”
For more information about Eliane Nirere’s work in Africa visit the IDEAS Research Lab website.
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[post_content] => [caption id="attachment_39773" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] UW ECE alumna Thy Tran (BSEE ‘93) is the Vice President of Global Front-End Procurement at Micron Technology, a worldwide leader in the semiconductor industry. She started from humble beginnings as a Vietnamese refugee in America, but she seized every opportunity this country offered — learning, growing, and using her electrical engineering degree from the UW to build a life defined by purpose, achievement, and service. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
What does it mean to live a good life — a rich, fulfilling life? This is a question many of us wrestle with at one time or another. For UW ECE alumna Thy Tran (BSEE ‘93), it is something she has pondered for years, not just in theory, but in the way she has chosen to live. Tran’s journey began with humble beginnings as a Vietnamese refugee, arriving in America with her family and little else but hope. She seized every opportunity this country offered — learning, growing, and using her electrical engineering degree from the UW to build a life defined by purpose, achievement, and service.
[caption id="attachment_39778" align="alignright" width="461"] Tran stands with the Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Program 2021 cohort after delivering the commencement address as the featured graduation speaker.[/caption]
Today, Tran is the Vice President of Global Front-End Procurement at Micron Technology, a worldwide leader in the semiconductor industry specializing in computer memory and storage solutions. She stands among the world’s experts in the process technology development of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, — a technology that powers countless electronic devices. Tran transitioned to her current role to learn more about the business side of semiconductors after serving as Vice President of DRAM Process Integration at Micron, where she led global teams across the United States and Asia, driving technology development and transferring advanced DRAM into high-volume manufacturing fabrication facilities. Her career spans more than three decades, with experience in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including pivotal leadership roles at two semiconductor fabrication startups.
Tran’s academic journey did not end at the UW. She is a recent alumna of the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ Executive Program and the McKinsey Executive Leadership Program. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, and a member of the Society of Women Engineers. Tran was the honored guest speaker for UW ECE’s 2025 Graduation Celebration and serves on the UW ECE Advisory Board. She is a strategic advisory board member for the International Semiconductor Executive Summit and Mercado Global, and a recipient of the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s 2023 Rising Women of Influence award. Tran will join the Micron Foundation Board of Directors in 2026. She is also an inventor holding seventeen patents and an entrepreneur who started small businesses of her own while working full time.
[caption id="attachment_39791" align="alignleft" width="456"] Tran with her husband, Chris, and children, Maila and Thoren, in Paris, France in 2022.[/caption]
Beyond her professional accomplishments, Tran is a mother of two, a real estate investor, traveler, avid art and book lover, and a collector. Her passion for literature spans from modern fiction and poetry to English and Russian classics. Her personal library is a testament to her lifelong pursuit of knowledge and intellectual enrichment. By nearly any measure, she has achieved a life that is rich and fulfilling, and she has always managed to keep people — family, friends, colleagues — at the heart of her journey.
“I don’t define myself solely as American, Vietnamese, or an immigrant. My roots are in the people who have stood by me — my family and closest friends,” she said. “They are my foundation, the ones who keep me grounded. And for the past 20 years, my husband’s unwavering support has been my anchor through the toughest moments. At the same time, I know my life isn’t just about me. It’s part of something bigger — a network of connections and experiences that have shaped me in ways I never imagined. Every relationship, every shared moment reminds me that we’re all interconnected. Because in the end, success isn’t defined solely by what you achieve — it’s also measured by what you empower others to accomplish.”
These are the basic facts about Thy Tran, and they are impressive. Many at the UW and throughout the semiconductor industry know of her business acumen, her vast network, and her multicultural insight. But what is less well-known is the long, arduous journey she undertook to reach where she is today.
A refugee from Vietnam
[caption id="attachment_39785" align="alignleft" width="306"] A photo of Tran holding her refugee number sign after arriving at a Thailand refugee camp in 1979.[/caption]
Tran’s father served as a colonel in the South Vietnamese military, fighting alongside U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. After the war ended, he was sentenced by the North Vietnamese government to 10 years in prison for his collaboration with the U.S. military. Recognizing the precariousness of their situation, Tran’s family decided to escape Vietnam in 1979, four years after the fall of Saigon. Tran was just 11 years old. With currency unstable, the family traded their life savings for gold bars to buy passage out of the country — a risky and complex endeavor. After two failed escape attempts, their third try was successful. Tran, her mother, stepfather, older sister, two younger brothers, and cousin boarded a boat bound for Thailand in the dead of night.
But their ordeal was far from over. The ocean was fraught with thunder, lightning, and violent storms. Armed pirates boarded their boat twice, robbing and assaulting passengers. After four days and three harrowing nights, Tran and her family arrived at a refugee camp in Thailand. There, they slept in a large tent shared with other families on the beach alongside other refugees, provided with only the barest necessities. Many found the camp to be a harsh new reality, but Tran saw it through a different lens.
“I remember the sand—smooth and white, like flour.” she recalled. “I watched the trees tilt and sway in the wind, taking it all in—the nature, the beauty—choosing to focus on that instead of the harsh reality of people surviving on bare necessities and in poor living conditions.”
[caption id="attachment_39786" align="alignright" width="290"] Tran with her mother and sister, Linh, in Vietnam.[/caption]
Tran’s family received sponsorship from her aunt in the U.S. after a year in the refugee camp. In immigration law, sponsorship is a legally binding contract to provide financial support, ensuring newcomers will not become a public burden. Tran and her family moved from Thailand to El Paso, Texas, where they began the process of adjusting to a new culture and way of life. Tran studied English as a Second Language, or ESL, quickly becoming a translator for her family. She still remembers her first trip to an American grocery store, marveling at the beautiful, shiny fruit that was so perfectly organized. She also recalled the kindness and cruelty she encountered.
“I remember a lot of things. For instance, other kids making fun of me because I looked different, had an accent, and could not communicate well, or later being told to go back to where I came from,” she said. “But I also experienced the kindness of strangers. Looking back, all the kindness far surpassed those bad memories.”
After a year in El Paso, friends of the family who owned a restaurant encouraged the family to move to Seattle. There, Tran’s stepfather, once a lawyer in Vietnam, reskilled as an electronics technician. Her mother, a former teacher, worked in their friend’s restaurant as a cook, and later other temporary jobs. While working, she went to nursing school to get her degree as a registered nurse. She eventually held two full-time nursing jobs for fourteen years. Tran’s mother also gave birth to two more daughters in Seattle, bringing the number of children in the family to six.
[caption id="attachment_39781" align="alignleft" width="338"] Tran with her sister, Linh, on a beach in Vietnam.[/caption]
While both parents worked, the children pitched in to help. Tran began by delivering newspapers, and soon her mother and siblings joined, managing six paper routes together. She proudly recalled earning an award from The Seattle Times for outstanding service. As she grew older, Tran balanced multiple jobs—working at McDonald’s, a community center, and even a funeral home. She also taught karate, worked as a camp counselor and receptionist, and, alongside her older sister, helped care for her younger siblings. She said these experiences fostered independence and maturity. Though her journey from stranger in a foreign land to proud American was marked by hardship, Tran said she remembered it as a magical time because she was with her family through it all.
Tran is descended from strong women who valued education. Her mother was the first woman from her village to attend a university, and her grandmother was the first girl from her village to go to school. With this lineage, it is no surprise that Tran excelled academically.
“I was always good in math and science, and they put me in the Alpha Mentor program for gifted students when I was in sixth grade,” she said. “My English was weak, but I still stood out academically. I was part of the math Olympiad and French team competitions, and we did well and received several trophies.”
Throughout high school, Tran took every opportunity she could to get involved, including playing varsity volleyball and cheerleading as well as becoming tennis captain and debate club president. Outside of school activities, she studied karate and earned her second-degree black belt, taught karate during high school and college, and even took home some trophies from the Western Regional Championship women’s competitions.
“Those recognitions taught me that success depends on your determination, effort, and abilities — not where you come from or your place in society,” she said.
From UW student to semiconductor expert
[caption id="attachment_39814" align="aligncenter" width="1135"] Throughout high school, Tran took every opportunity she could to get involved, including playing varsity volleyball and cheerleading, as well as becoming tennis captain and debate club president. Tran was a high school homecoming queen and was involved in a number of activities outside of her classes, including studying karate and earning her second-degree black belt. (far right) Tran during the UW Kappa Delta Sorority Pledge Week 1988.[/caption]
Tran excelled in junior high and high school, advancing several grades in math. She originally aspired to become an artist, but her talent in math and science, coupled with her family’s financial need, led a school counselor to advise her to pursue engineering. Tran took the advice, was accepted into the UW, and attended the University on a full-ride scholarship.
She flourished at the UW, joining the Kappa Delta Sorority and serving as scholarship chairman and Kappa Delta class president. She applied herself diligently to rigorous electrical engineering studies. She also took courses in philosophy and English literature to broaden her horizons. Yet, during her first years of undergraduate study, she struggled with regrets about giving up art, which made her engineering studies more challenging.
“To me, the best part is more about enjoying the journey — the friends you meet and the deep bonds you form, how you get there and how you grow and learn along the way.” — Thy Tran, UW ECE alumna (BSEE '93)
[caption id="attachment_39797" align="alignright" width="550"] Tran was among several industry leaders at the 30th Anniversary of the Global Semiconductor Alliance Awards, where the GSA rang the closing bell at the NASDAQ Stock Market on November 14, 2024.[/caption]
Everything changed the summer of her sophomore year, when she took a solo backpacking trip across Europe. The trip opened her eyes to art, architecture, history, and a world full of possibilities. She realized that to travel and immerse herself in rich, cultural experiences, she needed to be able to support that lifestyle. Rather than continuing to worry about “selling out,” she decided to embrace electrical engineering and her natural talent in math and science, recognizing that this was the ticket to living her best life. This mindset shift changed everything.
“For me, mindset can determine skill set,” she said. “If you have the right mindset — mental toughness, perseverance, and tenacity — the skill set is easier to acquire.”
After returning to the UW, Tran’s engineering studies began to come easily to her. She took a semiconductor physics course at UW ECE that became an inflection point. Tran said she found it fascinating, and as she called it, “the magic of semiconductors” landed her an internship at IBM, setting the stage for her future career.
A leader in DRAM technology
[caption id="attachment_39796" align="alignright" width="413"] Micron’s HBM4 is a third-generation, high-bandwidth memory cube, an example of Micron’s industry products enabled by DRAM technology. This product is designed to accelerate next- generation AI platforms by providing higher speeds, increased capacity, and better power efficiency.[/caption]
Tran’s first job after graduation was at Motorola in Austin, Texas, working on process technology for microprocessors and static random access memory, or SRAM, as a device engineer. After three and a half years at Motorola, her curiosity and desire to explore the world led her to Siemens, where she joined the company’s International Technology Transfer Management team. Tran played a key role in the ProMOS semiconductor manufacturing fab startup — a joint venture between Siemens and Mosel Vitelic — transferring DRAM technology from research and development to manufacturing.
“To me, the best part is more about enjoying the journey — the friends you meet and the deep bonds you form, how you get there and how you grow and learn along the way,” she said. “It’s also about taking stock of the path you are on, your efforts, your resilience, and the people who helped you or inspired you.”
From 1996 to 2008, Tran worked in the United States, Europe, and Asia, leading innovative and entrepreneurial projects. In 1997, she was part of the WaferTech startup team, a company now known as TSMC Washington in Camas, Washington. Two years later, she returned to Siemens, which spun off Infineon in Richmond, Virginia. At Infineon, which later spun off to Qimonda for the Memory sector, Tran advanced to the Technical Ladder Program as Principal Engineer and Overall Integration Leader. In 2004, she relocated to the company’s memory research and development headquarters in Dresden, Germany, to lead DRAM technology node development.
[caption id="attachment_39756" align="alignleft" width="337"] A silicon wafer containing hundreds of microchips produced by Micron.[/caption]
In 2008, Tran joined Micron, where she thrived and rose through the ranks—leading DRAM module development programs that included advanced capacitor, metallization, and through-silicon-via (TSV) process integration—before assuming the role of DRAM Process Integration node lead for several technology generations. Tran later oversaw teams across the U.S., Taiwan, and Japan. Her technical contributions and leadership have been pivotal to Micron’s DRAM technology development, helping the company achieve industry leadership in DRAM technology.
Tran is a steadfast innovator. Her inventions and patent disclosures have advanced semiconductor fabrication techniques, enabling more efficient and reliable memory devices. Her work has addressed critical challenges in miniaturization and performance optimization for modern electronics, including low-capacitance interconnect structures, advanced planarization techniques, and vertically integrated DRAM architectures. Collectively, her innovations have pushed the boundaries of semiconductor scaling, enabling smaller, faster, and more power-efficient consumer electronics.
“To continue scaling DRAM technology, we must keep pushing the limits of physics. That means being creative and innovative—finding new ways to enable the next generation of memory. It also requires making tough, sometimes risky decisions: setting the right strategy, balancing incremental improvements with disruptive changes, and ensuring robust risk mitigations to cover all bases.”
[caption id="attachment_39799" align="aligncenter" width="1201"] Tran was the recipient of the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s 2023 Women of Influence award. She is pictured here at the award celebration with Micron’s CEO and executives.[/caption]
Tran is also a fearless leader who knows how to motivate her team and stand up for them when needed. When she joined Micron, the company was behind its competitors in DRAM development. Tran rose through the ranks, assuming more leadership roles and responsibilities. Before long, she was leading the company’s DRAM Process Integration organization in Technology Development. Micron went from fast follower to industry leader within a few DRAM generations. Tran believes that a winning mindset was key to her team’s success, just as it had been for her as a UW undergraduate.
“Yesterday’s best is not good enough for tomorrow. So, you must be maniacal, and drive with a ‘what is possible’ mindset instead of just doing what you can to get by,” she said. “I always say, ‘go big or go home.’ Sometimes we bet wrong, but if you mitigate the risk, you will still come out on top — that is part of strategic and technical leadership.”
A lifelong learner
[caption id="attachment_39789" align="alignright" width="334"] Tran was the honored guest speaker for UW ECE’s 2025 Graduation Celebration, and she serves on the UW ECE Advisory Board. Her nephew was in the 2025 graduating class, and three generations of Tran’s family attended the ceremony. Photo by Tara Brown.[/caption]
Tran was invited to be the honored guest speaker for the UW ECE 2025 Graduation Ceremony. At the event, she noted that her nephew was in the graduating class, and she was visibly moved when speaking about her family. Three generations of Tran’s family attended the ceremony. All six of her siblings graduated from the UW, as did three nieces and her nephew. In total, they are, according to Tran, “10 proud Huskies!”. Through talent, determination, and the support of family, friends, and colleagues, this former Vietnamese refugee and her family, which now includes doctors, engineers, a researcher, and an economist are making significant contributions to America and society.
“I felt deeply humbled and grateful to be invited as the honored speaker. To me, it is a testament to the University’s values, reflected in the speaker profiles UW ECE chooses to showcase,” she said. “For me, it was a true homecoming, and it just filled my heart with tremendous pride and joy.”
Tran is focused on giving back to the next generation through mentorship at both the UW and Micron. She has served on the UW ECE Advisory Board for several years, bringing industry experience, insights, and connections to maximize opportunities for students and faculty. She is working with UW ECE to set up semiconductor fabrication facility site visits and is coordinating with Micron’s design and products team to provide more opportunities for students in the UW ECE Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or ENGINE, capstone program. At Micron, Tran has been the executive sponsor for the Women Leadership network, or MWLN, for several tenures and an active mentor for multiple programs, including MWLN, the Technical Leadership Program, Micron Young Professionals, and the Global Mentorship Program for external university students. She is a popular mentor with a long wait list of mentees.
“I felt deeply humbled and grateful to be invited as the honored speaker. To me, it is a testament to the University’s values, reflected in the speaker profiles UW ECE chooses to showcase. For me, it was a true homecoming, and it just filled my heart with tremendous pride and joy.” — Thy Tran
In October 2025, Tran delivered the closing keynote — Dream Big. Live Large. Give Back. — at the Society of Women Engineers’ WE25 conference in New Orleans, leaving thousands of attendees deeply moved. Tran received a standing ovation and sparked a wave of LinkedIn posts celebrating the power and authenticity of her story. Her message went beyond inspiration, igniting meaningful conversations about courage, leadership, and the limitless possibilities ahead.
And she continues to be a lifelong learner.
[caption id="attachment_39813" align="alignleft" width="567"] (left) Tran on the day of achieving the rank of second-degree black belt in karate while at the UW. (right) Tran’s oil-on-canvas study — an homage to French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, painted during her art school days.[/caption]
Over the years, Tran has studied painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, rare books at the University of Virginia, and explored other martial arts, including Kung Fu and Taekwondo, even while working as a full-time engineer. Her passion for knowledge and new experiences continues today. Recently, she was accepted into UC Berkeley’s full-time master’s degree program in information and data science, with an emphasis in artificial intelligence (AI). Tran says Micron and her own organization within the company have ambitious AI roadmaps with numerous initiatives underway. She felt that if she understood data science and AI at a deeper level, she could more effectively lead and coach her team. She also said that it is simply exhilarating to learn new things.
“I don’t do things only because they are necessary to advance. I choose the hard things because they stretch me — technically, intellectually — and because in the long run, they broaden my knowledge and perspective,” she reflected. “I can hang with engineers and artists, literary geeks, food and wine enthusiasts, political junkies, and world travelers. Being well-rounded doesn’t just enrich my life, but also others’ — it helps me connect with others with diverse backgrounds to form meaningful and lasting friendships. Most people go through life anchored in a single version of themselves. Every challenge we embrace, every curiosity we follow, uncovers another layer of who we are and who we might become.”
Epilogue: The many versions of a life well-lived
Thy Tran’s journey is a testament to the power of resilience, curiosity, and the courage to embrace possibility. From a refugee camp in Thailand to the global stage of semiconductor innovation, she has lived out answers to the question: What does it mean to live a rich, fulfilling life? From Tran’s experience, it means embracing opportunity, lifting others as you rise, and never ceasing to learn and grow. Her story is not just about achievement — it is about transformation, about the many versions of ourselves waiting to be discovered, and about the beauty of building bridges across cultures and generations.
[caption id="attachment_39812" align="aligncenter" width="1205"] Tran with three generations of her extended family, attending her brother Phuc’s wedding in Jamaica in 2014.[/caption]
See more photos of Thy Tran in this year's issue of The Integrator magazine.
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