Gururaj Naik, a recent graduate from ECE, has won the IEEE Photonics Society 2013 Graduate Student Fellowship. Each year, the fellowship program recognizes ten outstanding graduate student members of IEEE Photonics Society spanning geographical regions of the Americas, Europe/Mid‑East/Africa, and Asia/Pacific. The fellowships for the year 2013 will be awarded during IEEE Photonics Conference to be held September 8-12 at Bellevue, Washington.

During his PhD, Gururaj Naik worked in the groups of Professor Alexandra Boltasseva and Professor Vladimir M. Shalaev, where he introduced and developed unconventional materials for plasmonic and metamaterial applications that significantly improved the performance of these devices. Currently, the undesirable properties of material building-blocks form a major hurdle in the path for plasmonics and metamaterials towards next-generation photonics technology. Using “designer materials” as building-blocks can overcome this major problem and allow real-world applications of plasmonics and metamaterials devices in applications such as sensing, imaging, data storage, solar energy and medicine.

This research work has resulted in many invited papers and presentations, publications and press coverage. In the past, Gururaj has authored/co-authored 17 peer-reviewed journal articles and many conference publications. His paper on titanium nitride as a plasmonic material was chosen for Optical Society of America (OSA) press release and has been the top most downloaded paper of the journal in past two years. His research has also been highlighted by SPIE newsroom, Nature Photonics: News and Views, Purdue news and many other popular science news channels.