ECE PhD Student Awarded National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Research Fellowship
PhD student Jack Guida, electrical engineering, applies an athlete’s mindset of teamwork, learning, and collaborative competition to engineering. As an electrical engineering undergrad at Syracuse University, he landed an internship at Ball Aerospace doing radio frequency design. “It was super new to me. I’m someone who loves to learn. I was an athlete at Syracuse so I’m competitive including in academia.” Guida graduated from Syracuse in May 2021, starting his PhD at Northeastern that fall.
Initially, Guida searched for an electrical engineering master’s program built around research. Northeastern was on the list because of the co-op program and the Boston location near his extended family. “After I applied, some NU faculty reached out and asked if I was interested in doing a PhD instead. I always wanted to do research to contribute to the scientific community. This gave me the way to do that.”
Guida chose to focus his attention on microscale acoustics and integrated photonics. “I realized there’s so much to learn and hasn’t been done, which means a bunch of opportunities to publish in the field. It’s a multifaceted area of research that combines acoustic and electric properties; everything I’ve worked on so far are devices for signal processing applications. Wireless communication systems. A lot of the devices are building toward quantum transduction, which is important to quantum computing.”
Guida recently received a highly competitive U.S. Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to promising U.S. scientists and engineers to encourage them to pursue doctoral degrees in designated research disciplines of military importance. “The award gives me an opportunity and it shines a light on the Northeastern SMART research center, which is the research group I’m part of. With the funding, it will propel what we’re able to do and really allow us to explore some exciting ideas.” The highly competitive Fellowship Program has awarded nearly 4400 fellowships from over 65,000 applications to U.S. citizens and nationals since its inception in 1989.
He praises his principal investigator, ECE Assistant Professor Siddharta Ghosh. “He’s excited and motivates me throughout this process. A PhD has ups and downs, but he makes it easier with his insight and passion.” Guida mentions electrical and computer engineering professors Cristian Cassella and Matteo Rinaldi at the Northeastern SMART research center as well. “One thing about all the students and these professors is that it’s very collaborative and everyone is so excited to help each other. It’s super helpful and fun.”
His first publication last October was at the International Ultrasonics Symposium in Venice, Italy. “We used one of these acoustic devices to implement a finite impulse response filter, an application for signal processing.” He was recently accepted to another conference in Japan on transducers. After finishing his PhD, Guida wants to work in industry and do technical design. “Eventually, I want to oversee a research and development team.”