Alum Kamal Rudra recognized as Young Scientist to attend 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Alum Kamal Rudra (MS ECE 2023) has been invited to participate in the prestigious 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (Physics), as one of the 650 Young Scientists selected from a pool of over 20,000 applicants from more than 90 countries.

He will interact with 39 Nobel Laureates, including Gérard Mourou, who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize with Donna Strickland and Arthur Ashkin for their shared work in the field of laser physics. Mourou was a faculty member at the University of Michigan for 16 years, during which time he founded the Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. He is now the A.D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Rudra has had his heart set on attending the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting for Physics since 2019, when he first learned about the meetings during the senior year of his undergraduate degree at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Allahabad in India.

“It is extremely exhilarating that I have been invited to this meeting,” he said, “I’m looking forward to interacting with peer scientists and learning more about their research.”

Rudra credits his successes over the years to his strong motivation, academic excellence, and resilience. During his master’s education in ECE, Rudra seized every opportunity to expand his research horizons, from delving into photonics at MIT to working with synchrotron radiation in Germany.

I believe that encountering hurdles is inevitable, and it’s overcoming these obstacles that ultimately shapes your path forward

Kamal Rudra, ECE MS Alum

He has received numerous highly competitive awards for his work, including the 2023 Oxford University Press Best Poster Award at the 26th IUCr Congress & General Assembly, the 2022 JN Tata Endowment Gift Scholarship, the 2022 SPIE Laser Technology, Engineering and Applications Scholarship, and the 2022 IEEE EDS Masters Student Fellowship.

Rudra also encourages other early-career engineers to value and take advantage of the opportunities that can come from a master’s degree, even when they are challenging. He prioritizes mentoring young students and delivered an invited talk on engineering and research career opportunities in the field of semiconductors through the Student Mentorship Program and Varied Insights of Various Alumni at NIT Allahabad, India in 2022.

Rudra especially advocates for the value of education and research at the master’s and bachelor’s levels. He believes that these degrees help develop critical and strategic thinking, which set researchers up for success in research careers. He has been challenged in his career entering into applicant pools with majority PhD and postdoctoral scholars, but the opportunities he sought out during his master’s degree have paid off.

“I believe that encountering hurdles is inevitable, and it’s overcoming these obstacles that ultimately shapes your path forward,” he said.

During his time at U-M, Rudra strengthened his semiconductor fabrication and experimental design skills through internships at Meta and MACOM. He is currently working at IBM Research, where he addresses the challenges of scaling the back-end-of-line (BEOL) for future semiconductor device node technologies. He looks forward to tackling additional technical challenges in the field of semiconductors and continuing to work at the forefront of development.