Recognitions for Materials Engineering Students

Danitza Hernandez Participates in DOE CHiPPS Program

Danitza Hernandez '25 Materials Engineering, could hardly believe it: just two years ago, she'd been sleeping in a restaurant next to a grease trap while attending community college, and now here she was, working in the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Here she was, in a clean room in full gear (including a suit, hairnet, mask and gloves) cutting silicon wafers and spin coating them with polypeptoids in order to help make electronic chips smaller and more efficient. 

She describes the experience as "very surreal." It all began with her transfer from community college to SJSU and a peer program at the Engineering Student Success Center that led to work in Dahyun Oh's lab. Oh, an associate professor of chemical and materials engineering, started Hernandez on basic tasks, but soon Hernandez's interests and knowledge grew. She studied electrochemistry through YouTube videos and learned materials characterization (the creation of materials needed for things like semiconductors and electronics) through her work in the lab. 

From there, she was selected as a student scholar in the Energy Frontier Research Center for High Precision Patterning Science (CHIPPS) program, which is funded by the Department of Energy and involves six institutions: Berkeley Lab, Stanford University, Cornell University, Argonne National Laboratory, UC Santa Barbara and San José State University. The center's mission is to "create fundamental understanding and control of patterning materials and processes for energy-efficient, large-area patterning with atomic precision." 

In layman's terms, as the CHIPPS website states, "components that go into chips are getting smaller and smaller, but current methods for copying patterns onto wafers are limited in their precision." As chips get smaller, the patterning into smaller structures needs to evolve as well, and that is where the CHIPPS program comes in. 

At first, Hernandez worked with the program through Oh’s lab at SJSU, but Oh also encouraged her to apply to the CHiPPS summer program.

The ChiPPS student scholar program began in summer 2023 as a training program connected to the CHiPPS center that allowed students from SJSU to intern at Berkeley Lab for ten weeks, pairing them with a scientist mentor to work on advanced semiconductor manufacturing skills. Participants received stipends of $7,000 for undergrads and $8,000 for graduate students upon completion of the program. Hernandez was hesitant to apply because of her lack of experience. “I was just an undergrad and when I thought of going to a national lab, I just thought, ‘I can't do that,’” she says. “But thankfully, Dr. Oh encouraged me. It took a lot of hand-holding to even get me to submit the application.”

But submit she did. And she told her story: “I mentioned how even just doing the summer program would just be another sign that my life is changing for the better,” she remembers. “Going from living in a restaurant next to a sink to waking up in an actual bed and getting up and going to an actual work environment is very mind-blowing.” She got in.

She didn’t have a car, but both Ricardo Ruiz, her principal investigator at Berkeley Lab, and one of her fellow CHiPPS interns gave her rides, which saved her from having to get up at 5 a.m. to take BART to the lab. And then she quickly got to work. Hernandez focused on patterning, cutting and cleaning the silicon wafers involved in computer chips and then baking them with various solutions in order to begin the process of creating a smaller, more efficient chip.

Hernandez really enjoyed the work, even though it was difficult. “The people who were around me gave me a lot of interesting options that I didn’t know were possible,” she says. She’d assumed that getting a PhD in materials engineering meant teaching, which she wasn’t interested in, but they told her that she also could use a PhD to do research or work in a lab, opening up a new realm of possibilities for her future.

She also grew close to her lab group — they recently all went hiking together, and during the summer, they all went to see the Barbie movie together. She ended up making a PowerPoint of her best and worst moments in the lab with a fellow student researcher (including dropping a chip she’d spent six hours working on, which meant she had to start the process all over again).

The experience clearly changed her, and she’s grateful to everyone who helped along the way.

“I'm very thankful for Dr. Oh,” she says. “I struggle a lot with imposter syndrome, and she's been my mentor ever since I met her. She's been very supportive, very understanding. And I thought it was just her, but I found that same kind of heart in the people at LBL, even with people who weren't in my research group.”

She urges other students like her, who may feel like they don’t have enough experience to work in a national lab, to fill out an application anyway. “It's not just you who's feeling this,” she tells them. “It's other people, too, who feel out of place in the scientific community. But you could be that mentor later on to people who look like you, people you don't really see in these science research facilities.”

Timothy Tan Wins Audience Award at ASPIRES 2023 Poster Slam

Timothy Tan holding his 2nd place Audience Award certificate after presenting at the ASPIRES (Advancing STEM Pioneers in Research in Energy Sciences) 2023 Poster Slam. Photo courtesy of Timothy Tan.

Timothy Tan, ’23 MS Materials Engineering, also was changed by his experience with the CHiPPS summer program. He originally started out as a business major, then switched to environmental sciences. But he found business too abstract, and while he loved the science of environmental studies, he missed math. So engineering was the perfect fit. He worked in the field after his undergraduate degree, but eventually came back to school for his master’s.

He loved his time in the program, where he worked in the lab with Oleg Kostko, a research scientist at Berkeley Lab and his project’s principal investigator.

As Tan explains it, a major CHiPPS program goal is designing computer chips that can store more memory. In order to do that, scientists are working on various processes, and are “hung up” on a material in one of these processes. (The material, part of a class of polymers called “photoresists,” is used to develop the patterns on the chips.)

Tan and his fellow researchers designed equipment that could look at this material in greater detail in order to note structural changes during the process and then ultimately perfect the material to get it to do what they want. The equipment design took over much of his summer, and the project resulted in 3D-printed models, and a proof of concept for the equipment, an “in-situ Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer” (try saying that five times fast). The proof of concept, which included a custom 3D-printed jig and “a software program that continuously identifies the molecular structure to track how the structure changes over time,” allowed them to move on to next steps and actually start developing the physical equipment.

Tan enjoyed his time in the lab, and says his most memorable moment happened towards the end of his internship, when they ran an experiment to see if their design worked.

“It could easily have been the last week and we could have gotten no results,” he says. “Before every experiment, I'd say to my friend, ‘Man, I hope this works.’”

Luckily, it did. “You could feel the sense of achievement shared among our group,” he remembers. “That was the best part.”

His work at LBL also showed him the possibilities of national lab work. And he found kindred spirits in the lab.

“It's been hard for me to find people who I felt were similar to me,” he explains. “But with this internship, I felt the most similar to the people I worked with that I ever have. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity through San José State to see what it's like there in the summer.”

A Mentor's Joy

For her part, Oh is excited for the program to continue – luckily, it’s already set for another round in 2024. “All the students who participated were very passionate,” she says.

“This type of opportunity should be given to our students more frequently. I’m glad that the program can help students gain research experience in the national lab, meet many world-renowned scientists, PhDs, and postdocs and give them a chance to use cutting- edge materials characterization tools which are not available at SJSU.”

And on a more personal level, she’s delighted with Hernandez’s progress. “I really want her to succeed,” she says. “That would be more rewarding to my career than anything else.”