Frequently asked questions from prospective PhD students and postdoctoral researchers
Below we answer some of the most common questions from students interested in joining our group. Please don't hesitate to contact us for other questions!
Students work very hard during the course of their stay with our group, which can vary from 4 to 5 or more years. The schedule can involve long hours, including weekends and sometimes throughout the night. But this cannot be avoided for several reasons! You get so involved in your work that you want to go on, you want to get that measurement that you're striving to obtain. And the rewards can be high!
Prof. Lipson meets with each and every student individually at least once every 2 weeks. This is in addition to the weekly group meetings. If needed, a student can always request additional meetings.
Generally, after discussing it with Prof. Lipson, yes! This is possible because our group receives quite a lot of funding that allows some flexibility in the research.
All of the students and Postdocs sit together in a nice shared area. This setup encourages beneficial interactions between all of the members of the group.
We look to work with VERY reliable, motivated, creative and hard working students that also enjoy working collaboratively with other members of the group (and sometimes with other groups as well). Students with a high GPA and/or that have already published journal papers (as first author) are strongly encouraged to apply to work with the group.
Our group currently works on more than 15 different projects, and Prof. Lipson is quite flexible regarding which specific project a new student takes on. During the first few months a new student has joined the group, he or she is assigned a relatively small (publishable) project to get started, which will involve (like all projects) design, computer simulations, cleanroom fabrication and testing phases. After the successful completion of such a project, the student then works much more independently.
Our group has more than 250 publications in peer reviewed journals (Nature, Optica, Optics Express, Optics Letters, Physical Review Letters, etc.) which are highly read by scientists in related fields of research. We also have well over 40,000 journal citations, which is an indicator that our work receives a lot of attention in the scientific community. Our group essentially established the field of silicon photonics from our work on the modulator and other related devices (nanotaper, slot waveguide, etc.).
Several of them go on to pursue Postdoctoral research in many fields (electrical engineering, chemistry, etc.), while others find jobs in academia (as professors) and for companies (Intel, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, Oracle, technology startups, etc.).