Meet our advisors

We are fortunate to work with a group of advisors that includes industry veterans with decades of leadership experience as well as mid- and early-career engineers. They represent small start-ups, mid-sized companies, and large companies with long histories. They provide different perspectives from their experiences in many different companies on the various career paths available to engineers today. They also help us maintain tight connections to industry to insure the success of our students.

Dr. Santokh S. Badesha is manager of open innovation for the Xerox Corporation. He is a Xerox Fellow and has received two Ph.D. degrees in organic chemistry, the first from Punjab Agricultural University in India and the second from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.  At Xerox, Dr. Badesha is responsible for leading inter-organizational efforts with both internal and external value chain partners, building academic and industrial partnerships, and providing critical technical support for product programs. He is also a technical liaison for talent development and acquisition and collaborative research to a number of academic intuitions. In addition, he serves on a number of internal Xerox committees that are responsible for Intellectual Property generation, evaluation, and management. With 250 U.S. patents, Dr. Badesha is Xerox Corporation’s most prolific inventor. Among his numerous awards is an Honorary Doctor of Science from Clarkson University for his contributions to science, technology, and intellectual property, building academic and industrial partnerships, and his help in shaping research programs.

Dr. Jean Wang joined Amazon in 2014 to explore new products and services, and now leads a team to execute on a customer-focused initiative. She previously served as an optics engineer, Hardware Lead and Chief of Staff for Google Glass, co-developed intellectual property strategies at Intellectual Ventures and investigated device performance for space applications at Northrop Grumman. Jean received her Ph.D. and M.S. at University of Washington, and B.S. at California Institute of Technology, all in Electrical Engineering. She is a recipient of the UW College of Engineering Early Career Diamond Award, Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship and NSF Ph.D. Fellowship.

Dr. Amitava Das is CEO of Tagore Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and has worked in various roles during his 25+ years in the semiconductor industry – first on the faculty of EE at IIT-Bombay, then in Motorola in a number of roles –0.18um CMOS technology development at APRDL, RF IC/Module Design Lead in Motorola’s wireless IC design division and finally in an operations productizing very Motorola’s high-volume IC’s with a global supply chain. In 2011, he co-founded Tagore Technology with Manish Shah. Tagore Technology is a venture funded fabless GaN IC company located near Chicago, IL.

Dr. Thomas Dungan is a member of technical staff at Broadcom, previously with Hewlett Packard, Agilent, Micron, and Avago Technologies.  Tom received his Ph.D. at Purdue and has spent 30 years working on the co-optimization of process and circuit technology for performance computing, optical navigation, image sensors, and SERDES communication channels, for both performance and reliability.  His most recent work involves technology delivery for cell phone handset RF front-end modules, including GaAs HBT power amplifiers and RF SOI switches, and development of solutions for the electro-thermal-mechanical challenges in packaging RF and millimeter wave circuitry in the minimum physical volume.

Harsh Kaushikkar has been at Apple in the Silicon Engineering Group for the past 10 years. Harsh received his MSEE degree from Purdue and is currently Senior Manager, leading a team of about 20 people working on high performance SOC memory sub-systems, system cache and coherence solutions for our mobile SOC products. He also leads the architecture of these solutions and was a pioneering member of a core group that developed Apple’s SOC interconnect infrastructure. Prior to joining Apple, held a Senior Design position at Sun Microsystems and worked on high performance computing architectures for server class microprocessors.

Dr. Ali Kesharvarzi is a visionary technologist and a leader who has been at the forefront of technology innovation with a track record of delivering critical process technologies, devices, circuits, SoCs, modules and sub-systems to the semiconductor industry. Ali is a founder of Leading Edge Research, and he is also now at Stanford University as a visiting research scholar and a senior advisor to SystemX in Electrical Engineering. He is an advisor to several startup companies. Ali serves as a subject matter expert, an industry liaison and as an advisor for DARPA in the Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI) programs. Earlier in is career, Ali was the Vice President of R&D and a Fellow at Cypress Semiconductor. In addition to Cypress, Ali has had various senior R&D and leadership roles at Intel Corporation, TSMC, and GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Ali has contributed to device technologies, the field of low-power circuits and co-optimization of technology and design for power and performance. Ali received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and was recognized as an Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer (OECE) by Purdue University in 2015.

Dr. Srikanth Krishnan is a senior Reliability Manager and a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Texas Instruments. He is also a Centennial Fellow of the Penn State Engineering Science Department. Dr. Krishnan received his B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. Subsequently he received his M.S./Ph.D in Engineering Science from Penn State University and MBA from Southern Methodist University. He joined Texas Instruments in 1992 and has experience in Process, Design, Test, Failure Analysis and Reliability. He served as the General Chair for IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) 2013 and as the IRPS board member from 2014-2017. Dr. Krishnan is a recipient of Semiconductor Research Corporation’s  Mehboob Khan Award  (2012 and 2017) as an outstanding Industry Liaison.

Dr. Konstantinos Laskaris was born in Athens, Greece, received his diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technological University of Athens (NTUA), his master’s degree in Signal Processing from the Imperial College London, UK, and his PhD in Electric Motor geometry optimization for variable speed drives from the NTUA, Greece. Since 2012, Dr. Laskaris has been the Chief Motor Designer at Tesla Motors, located in the Silicon Valley, California, where he leads the team of motor design engineers. His research interests include parametric design and loss modeling of synchronous and asynchronous machines using finite element analysis, as well as development of multi-objective optimization methods using supercomputers. Dr. Laskaris has also worked in education, as a laboratory partner in NTUA, teaching the science of electric machines and is a co-founder of the Prometheus team in NTUA, which participates in EV fuel economy contests and holds the Panhellenic fuel consumption record today.

Dr. Colin McAndrew is a Fellow at NXP Semiconductors. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo, Canada and then spent seven years working in the electric power industry before joining AT&T Bell Labs. Beginning at AT&T Bell Labs, Motorola, Freescale, and for more than 30 years now, he has primarily worked on modeling semiconductor devices for circuit simulation. He contributed to the development of models for MOS and bipolar transistors, power MOS devices, JFETs and resistors (single- and double-gate), and MOS capacitors, and developed the backward-propagation-of-variance technique for statistical device modeling. Besides model development, he has contributed to benchmarks for MOS transistor models (especially symmetry testing), test structures, and parameter extraction techniques, and has implemented model compilers and automated model QA software.

Harish Suryanarayana is Senior Research Scientist working as a research and development engineer on power converter systems applications at ABB US Corporate Research Center. His current goal is to enhance converter system efficiency while simultaneously reducing cost using wide bandgap semiconductors. He received the B. Tech. and M. Tech. degrees (dual degree) in electrical and computer engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)–Madras, Chennai, India, in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, in 2016. Since 2014, he has been with ABB Corporate Research, Raleigh, NC, USA where his interests include wide bandgap power electronics applications and hardware, filter design, converter systems control, EMI mitigation, and design optimization.

Brian Sutton is a Principal Hardware Engineer at Microsoft. Previously, he was a Senior Manager in the Embedded Systems Engineering group at Mercury Systems, with over 13 years of experience in embedded systems with an emphasis on system security. His experience spans automotive IoT devices through x86 server class platforms. At Mercury, he was responsible for new product definition, architecture, and implementation including digital and software design for FPGAs and SoCs and led the system security team driving bid and proposal activities, direct customer interaction, and contract execution. Prior to joining Mercury Systems, he worked as a Product Development Engineer at AMD focusing on automated testing, characterization, and failure analysis of x86 microprocessors. Sutton completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Purdue University with a focus on quantum and probabilistic computing architectures leveraging spintronics.​

Kin Tan is an independent consultant specializing in Business and Operational Excellence. He has been working in various functions for the past 10 years for GaAs Labs, LLC; a private equity company focused in financing, acquisition and developing world class companies addressing communication semiconductors and related markets. Kin received his MSEE from Purdue. During the first part of his career, he held various positions in operations, product line management, quality, product and technology development at RFMD, Sirenza Microdevices, TRW Space and Defense, Hughes Aircraft Torrance Research Center, and Honeywell Physical Sciences Center. Subsequently, he was actively involved with several portfolio companies such as MIMIX Broadband, Macom Technology Solutions and Nitronex. In those organizations, he held senior operating and management positions and drove the integration and re-alignment of key businesses, product lines and operational functions into best in class operating companies.

Steve Cuppy is a principal of Indiana Microelectronics, LLC, in West Lafayette and is responsible for business development. A start-up building on cutting-edge research in applied electromagnetics and advanced packaging materials, Indiana Microelectronics designs and produces tunable microwave filters for co-site interference and jamming mitigation.  Previously, Steve worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, and AirTouch International (now Vodafone), primarily in the field of switching and wireless communications. He co-founded Criterion Wireless Corp., a company specializing in measuring market share statistics for wireless service providers. He also served as president of a diversified aviation company. During his career, he has lived in Japan and France. In addition to bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Purdue, Steve earned an MBA from the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, France.