The SUNY Polytechnic Institute Office of Research and Graduate Studies is pleased to announce Ph.D. candidate Rubab Ume as the Inaugural recipient of the New York State Center of Excellence in Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnology (CENN) Fellowship. The CENN is funded by the NYSTAR Division of Empire State Development and is hosted at SUNY Poly’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.   CENN’s mission is to have universities engage with and support private companies in emerging high-technological fields in New York State and to expand technology-related businesses and employment. 

The CENN Fellowship was initiated to support a Ph.D. student to establish or further a collaboration with a New York-based company for up to one year. Rubab Ume is a strong Ph.D. candidate in Professor Serge Oktyabrsky’s laboratory, currently working with IBM under the SUNY-IBM AI Collaborative Research Alliance. The project, with strong involvement of IBM experts Dr. G. Cohen, Dr. K. Brew, and IBM management, encompasses research of Group III-Sb Alloys for Multilevel Phase Change Memories. IBM is currently one of the leaders in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and is looking for novel materials and devices to critically improve power, speed, data retention, and endurance of next-generation AI hardware components.

The result of this project will directly support IBM’s efforts to assess novel binary compound phase change materials and technologies for analog and multilevel phase-change memory cells. This joint research will produce multiple publications with IBM, conference presentations, and in addition to Ms. Ume’s Ph.D. thesis, potential joint patents. The work with IBM has already leveraged funding from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) alongside another proposal under development to the National Science Foundation (NSF) on researching novel principles of PCM analog operation. These activities occur on campus and will catalyze IBM’s continued growth within the state.

In addition to supporting companies in New York to achieve their development and commercialization goals, the CENN Fellowship was launched to create a pipeline of well-educated and trained employees who will grow into the future leaders within these and other high-tech companies in the state. It is the goal of the CENN leadership that there will be an ability to grow the program to support as many as four or more fellows per year. This growth would further strengthen the Ph.D. program at SUNY Poly and contribute toward the institution obtaining Carnegie Classification. For more information about the CENN Fellowship program and how to participate in the future, please contact Ross Goodman, Deputy Director of CENN (rgoodman@sunypoly.edu) or Krista Thompson, Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies (kthompson@sunypoly.edu).