What's Been and What's Ben

My plan is to graduate KAUST inside of one academic year (as in next May). After that I need to do something. If I want to apply to a PhD program then I must take the GREs, and deadlines are very close. They are like SAT/ACT tests for graduate school. I thought I had dodged them, but should have taken them when everybody else was. I am thinking about trying to get a job. Prospects in the US are scary, and I may be tempted by Saudi Aramco money. I don’t really know what I want to go into. I have narrowed it down a bit. My currently path suggests something to do with crystals: optoelectronics (LEDs, laser pointers, and optical computing) or MEMS (very tiny things that move). Both have their advantages. My past as an optical engineer makes me lean towards optoelectronics, but I see MEMS as being potentially more interesting because it is a newer and more applied technology (physical, like lego bricks). MEMS devices are the things that tell the angle of tilt in your iPhone and Wii controller. They also deploy your airbag and make the image in many digital projectors. I am taking an approach of just doing both and possibly just doing optical-MEMS, which is a field, they even have a research group at the U of M.

My current research is in the future feasibility (all on paper, no lab yet) of making a very small fiber-optic camera for looking inside of tissue using dense-wavelength multiplexing developed by the telecommunication (100% of internet use does this) and some harsh chromatic dispersion to sort out these colors into a grid that uses confocal principles to regather the light and produce a 2-D image through a single-mode fiber with some random optics attached at the end. It could greatly improve the doctor’s ability to look inside of patients. It was proven to work conceptually at UCLA recently.

I am thinking of trying to get into making good animations of semiconductor manufacturing processes for educational purposes, since many of my classes would greatly benefit from these aides.