Professor Prabhakar R. Bandaru

Address: Room 258, Engineering 2
Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
9500 Gilman Drive, Mailcode 0411
La Jolla, CA 92093-0411

Phone: (858) 534 – 5325 (Office), (858) 822-4775 (Lab.) (858) 534-2437 (Lab.)
Fax: (858) 534 – 5698
e-mail: pbandaru@ucsd.edu

Prab Bandaru is presently a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was a former Director of the Materials Science Program for two terms, at U.C. San Diego (2015-2021). He is also affiliated to the Electrical Engineering and the Nanoengineering departments at UCSD. His research group is mainly interested in topics related to electrochemical energy storage, control of thermal energy, and fluid flow at the nanoscale. The basis of the underlying investigations is materials physics and chemistry, invoking the electrical, optical, and thermal properties of materials at the mesoscopic and microscopic levels. The group investigates various applications which include information processing and storage and sensors.

Significant honors:
• Qualcomm Faculty-Mentor Award Fellowship (2013- 2014)
• Visiting faculty, Department of Physics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, 2013
• NSF CAREER Award, National Science Foundation, 2007-2012
• Guest Scientist, Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, August, 2007
• Scientific American 50, regarded for the top 50 scientific researchers in the world, specifically cited for achievements in Nano-
electronics, 2006
• Faculty Career Development Program Award, UC, San Diego, April, 2006
• Visiting Scientist, lectured on Frontiers of Nanoelectronics, Korea Institute of Advanced Study (KIAS), 2006
• Invited Lecturer on Frontiers in Nanoelectronics, Korea Institute for Advanced Study, March, 2006
• Chosen Visiting Fellow in Quantum Information Science, University of Queensland, Australia, 2005
• Flint Seminar Speaker in Solid State and Optics, Yale University, New Haven, 2004
• National Talent Search (NTS) Scholarship, India.

Work history and background:
Subsequent to undergraduate study at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Prab Bandaru received his Ph.D. at UC, Berkeley, with a graduate thesis in the thermodynamics of magneto-optical materials, under the supervision of Prof. Tim Sands (Materials Science) and Prof. Alan Portis (Physics). He later studied ferroelectric materials for non-volatile random access memories (NV-RAMs) in the Silicon Valley (Applied Materials Inc., Santa Clara). Prior to his arrival as an Assistant Professor at UC, San Diego, Prab Bandaru was a post-doctoral fellow in the Electrical Engineering department at UC, Los Angeles, with Prof. Eli Yablonovitch, where he studied nano-fabrication techniques, low temperature solid state science, and Si-Ge nanophotonics.

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