Alec Hammond, a master’s student in the Electrical Engineering department, was awarded the 2019 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Award. He will use the funding at Georgia Tech, where he will pursue a PhD (also in electrical engineering) after he graduates from BYU this week.
The NDSEG Fellowship is a highly competitive, portable fellowship that is awarded to U.S. citizens and nationals who intend to pursue a doctoral degree. NDSEG confers high honors upon its recipients, who are expected to show promise and aptitude in the STEM field. NDSEG Fellowships last for three years and pay for full tuition and all mandatory fees, along with a generous monthly stipend.
The fellowship program is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Applicants submit a personal statement, a research proposal, three letters of recommendation, transcripts, and GRE scores. Hammond was selected out of 2928 applicants nationwide.
Hammond’s field of study—silicon photonics—uses photons instead of electrons to route information on chip. The hope is that this technology will complement today’s electronics industry and transform fields like quantum computing and telecommunications.
Of his interest in the field, Hammond said, “I first discovered silicon photonics as an undergraduate. It was (and still is) a young and developing technology that demonstrated great promise to revolutionize several technical fields. I saw how relevant silicon photonics was within the emerging machine learning and quantum fields and knew that this would be an influential technology platform.”
Since then, he’s published several papers, including his master’s thesis, that attempt to make silicon photonics accessible to more engineers by simplifying the design process.
“As a master's student, I've been working on various silicon photonics projects for telecommunications, biosensing, and quantum applications. I've spent the majority of my time developing new silicon photonic simulation tools that leverage machine learning. This is really important because photonic circuits are much more difficult to model than their electronic counterparts,” Hammond said.
After he finishes his studies at Georgia Tech, Hammond plans to take what he has learned into industry by hopefully starting his own company.
“I have several different ideas that would each incorporate integrated photonics in some fashion. I would love to start a company that accelerates information processing hardware using silicon photonics. Or perhaps I could continue with my modeling work," Hammond said. "It would be great to create a product in this field that is influential and would affect a lot of other fields within communications or computation. I want to be a world player in those areas and I think this is a good pathway to do that.”