People

News

March 2013. Our paper on “Radiation Model for THz Transmission-Line Metamaterial QC-Lasers” wins 2013 IEEE Trans. THz Science and Technology Best Paper Award.
January 2013. We report the first THz active composite right/left handed (CRLH) metamaterial waveguides in Applied Physics Letters.
January 2012. Prof. Williams wins NSF CAREER award.
April 2011. Our upcoming talk on active THz metamaterial waveguides at SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing (DSS) Conference is featured in the SPIE Newsroom (April 11 2011).
July 2010. Our proposal for THz metamaterial lasers has been covered in Nature Photonics "Research Highlights”.
March 2008. Prof. Williams wins DARPA Young Faculty Award.
September 2007. Nature Photonics publishes a review paper on THz quantum-cascade lasers.

Lab Director: Benjamin S. Williams

Assistant Professor - Department of Electrical Engineering
Member - California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI)

Contact Information:
Benjamin Williams
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
68-117 Engineering IV Building
420 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1594
Phone: (310) 825-6961

Biography

Benjamin Williams obtained his B.S. in Physics at Haverford College in 1996, where he performed thesis work on mixing in two-dimensional turbulent fluid flows, for which he received the American Physical Society Apker prize. He then received his M.S. in 1998 and Ph.D. in 2003 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. During this time he developed some of the first terahertz quantum cascade lasers. Prior to joining UCLA, Williams was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Since 2007, Prof. Williams has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UCLA, and is a Henry Samueli Engineering Fellow. He was awarded a 2008 DARPA Young Faculty Award and the 2012 NSF CAREER award.

Curriculum Vitae

Current Members

Postdocs

Zhijun Liu
Postdoctoral Scholar
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Princeton 2008
Projects: THz properties of topological insulators, mid-IR quantum cascade lasers

Zhijun Liu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, in 2000 and 2003, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 2008. His doctoral research was on high-performance mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers for sensing applications. From October 2008 to September 2010, he was with the Division of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, RI, as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. During this time, his research was on subwavelength microdisk lasers and infrared photovoltaic devices using lead salt nanocrystals and carbon nanotubes. His current research interests include infrared and terahertz devices and spectroscopic study of topological insulators.




	Graduate Students


	Philip Hon Graduate Student Researcher Project: Terahertz metamaterial modeling and characterization

Benjamin Burnett
Graduate Student Researcher
Project: Nanowire intersubband optoelectronics

Ben received his M.S in Electrical Engineering at UCLA in 2012, and is currently working towards a Ph.D.


	Luyao Xu (Zoe) Graduate Student Researcher / M.S. Candidate Project: Mid-IR quantum cascade lasers Luyao received her B.S in Optical Engineering at Zhejiang University (PRC) in 2011, and is currently working towards her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at UCLA.


	Partia Naghibi M.S. Graduate Student Project: THz QC-laser microfabrication

Christopher Curwen
Graduate Student Researcher / M.S. Candidate
Project: THz metamaterial quantum cascade lasers

Chris received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State in 2012 and is currently working towards his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at UCLA.


	Undergraduate Students


	Cody Peterson Undergraduate student researcher Project: Electromagnetic simulation of THz CRLH metamaterial waveguides


		Brandon Wu Undergraduate student researcher Project: Calibration schemes for infrared ellipsometry

	Alumni

Amir Ali Tavallaee (received Ph.D. EE UCLA 2012)
Currently at MIT as a postdoc.

Alexandros Shailos (postdoc)
Currently at Intel Corp.

Zhiping Chen (graduate student researcher)
Currently in UCLA Physics Department

Cyrus Haselby (graduate student researcher)

Karan Mehta (undergraduate researcher)
Karan received his B.S. in EE and Physics in June 2010. He was the recipient of the UCLA EE Dept. 2009-2010 Outstanding Bachelor of Science Award. He is currently a graduate student in EECS at MIT.

Matthew Puckett (undergraduate researcher)
Matthew received his B.S. in EE in June 2011. He is currently a graduate student in EE at UCSD.


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