Shahin Receives CALCE Best Presenter Award

University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) consortium members selected David Shahin, a third-year Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. student, as the Best Student Presenter for the fall 2015 Electronic Products and Systems Consortium Technical Review. The event was held in the Stamp Student Union on October 20-22, 2015 by CALCE.

Shahin's advisor, Professor Aris Christou, asked that he give a presentation on one of his current research topics at the CALCE event. His research focuses on the development of an in-house graphene transfer and fabrication process that can be used to fabricate graphene electrical interconnects on various substrates, including both polymer substrates for flexible display technologies, and gallium nitride semiconductors for power electronics application.

This transfer product will allow graphene reliability to be assessed under various conditions, including cyclic bending for the display interconnects, and cyclic electrical/thermal stressing for the high power devices. He has been doing a lot of process development just to allow fabrication of these parts so that he will be able to test the materials after fabrication.

Shahin became interested in materials engineering as a junior in high school when he attended an ASM International Materials Camp held at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He chose this area of engineering because he could work on materials projects relating to any of the other fields. Shahin completed his undergraduate and master's degrees in Ceramic Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

During his undergraduate career at Missouri S&T, Shahin participated in ultra-high temperature ceramics processing research for hypersonic aerospace vehicles. He also completed a co-op at a national lab studying the edge fracture behavior of glassy materials. There, his graduate research was devoted to processing lead-free capacitor dielectric materials. As a doctoral student, he currently works on gallium nitride power semiconductor device fabrication research, etching process development for nanocrystalline diamond thin films, and the focus of his winning presentation, graphene.

In the past, Shahin was selected as a participant in the American Society for Engineering Education's Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP). He was also awarded a University Fellowship by the UMD Graduate School.

After graduating from the Ph.D .program, Shahin plans to pursue government or corporate research. He interests include working on some of the materials challenges that our country is currently facing, such as energy, security, and exploration. He would eventually like to work in a high-level management position in one of these institutions or even create his own company. Shahin was extremely honored to have been recognized by the consortium.

The CALCE Electronics Products and System Consortium (EPSC) provides a forum for defining fundamental research needs, conducting research and sharing research findings among participating organizations. The research focus for the CALCE EPSC includes risk assessment, mitigation and management for electronic products and systems.

Published December 15, 2015