Brief:
Hello stranger, welcome and nice to meet you; thanks for taking the time to be here! 😀
My name is Shantanu Kallakuri. I am a recent graduate of Cornell University and BITS Pilani working on semiconductors for energy/optics/electronics. I’m presently a process engineer at Applied Materials Inc., Sunnyvale, working on advancing Plasma Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition (PE-ALD) for next-generation semiconductor nodes and emergent devices. For more details on my past research and other work please refer to my CV here.
Applications of my past work fall mainly in these areas: 1) energy-efficient electronic / optic / photonic / AR / VR devices 2) self-assembled fibers & thin-films with exotic properties like symmetry / chirality / magnetism 3) self-assembled fibers to remedy heavy-metals like Arsenic and Lead 4) nanomotors for cheap point-of-care viral diagnostic micro-fluidic paper chips in developing nations and 5) Dye sensitized solar cells.
My interests have led to the pursuit of an MS with thesis at Cornell advised by Prof. Richard Robinson & Prof. Tobias Hanrath where I’d focused on the ‘Development of multiscale hierarchical structures from nanocluster mesophases. This work has been covered in our recent Nature Materials paper and in the media here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Super excited to see where this work leads!
For a quick summary on the kind of work I’m involved in, please refer to my publications (here) and patents (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5, / 6, Full list here), and book chapter.
Please feel free to reach out at shantanuk100@gmail.com / sk3269@cornell.edu if you wish to engage in any discussions, scientific/profession/personal, have any questions, or just wish to chill out with a conversation. I love to brainstorm ideas and philosophies.
For the love of all things material!
Motivations:
My fundamental interest lies in bottom-up materials chemistry approaches to help design and build functional materials starting from individual entities like atoms / quantum-dots / nanocrystals / small molecules using methods that require no intervention i.e. molecular self-assembly / directed self-assembly / amphiphilic self-assembly / atomic layer deposition / chemical vapor deposition. As most of these routes are self-spontaneous given right conditions; atoms & molecules automatically assemble into anything we want them to, only limited by our imagination.
Reasons for this interest are mainly because such approaches massively amplify and enhance properties of those very individual entities in systematic low-entropy routes with high surface/volume ratios as opposed to bulk materials which have large disorder at the microscale and lower s/v. This consequently increases the efficacy of these properties and also makes possible to harness regular as well as exotic quantum properties (Like size-quantization or superconductivity).
The question we’d been trying to answer with my thesis work was this: How can we emulate and compete with the supremely beautiful and complex self-assembly processes that nature usually follows in molecules like DNA and natural photonic structures (eg: butterfly wings) and what building blocks can we use to make this self-assembly happen. Self-assembly by itself has been a popular and well-known field but being able to generate a macroscale (bulk) structure starting directly from the atomic scale has been the focus of a large, challenging public body of work, and so far not accomplished to the 7 order of magnitude scales (nano to centi) that we have demonstrated in our work (1, 2, 3, 4)! The fact that we were able to build a system to harness these atomic properties without property loss in bulk material, but without the use of million-dollar semconductor lithography/fabrication/epitaxial equipment and using just some beakers and chemicals in a lab is exciting. Our postdoc Haixiang Han and I were able to successfully build this system together in Prof. Richard Robinson’s lab at Cornell.
Prior sojourns:
Prior to my work at Cornell, I was a Project Assistant at Prof. Julia Ortony’s lab in MIT, in the Department of Materials Science (DMSE), on self-assembling energy materials prior to which I was a Research assistant at Prof. Shafiee’s lab in Harvard Medical School working on rapid and cheap point-of-care diagnostics for HIV and HCV diagnosis (Published in ACS Nano and Nature Communications). and an undergraduate Thesis student at the Indian institute of Chemical Technology (IICT). I completed my undergraduation with a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering and a Master’s in Chemistry from BITS Pilani, India.
Views on Energy:
Access to minimum energy, even today, remains a distant dream for nearly 1.1 billion individuals by UN estimates. That people still live in wretched conditions of no power despite extravagant power consumption elsewhere, is unfortunate. When we get vexed at just an hour’s power-outage, it is not difficult to imagine the plight of people under perennial darkness. An individual should, at any time, at any place, have the capability to meet one’s own energy needs, without being subject to governmental, societal, or physical constraints. That, is my firm belief. My interests thus lie in anything that facilitates this ‘self-sustenance’ through efficient semiconductor systems or material systems that are achieved from such material or process engineering innovations.
Chemystery:
Science, engineering, and art are, to me, major avenues to bring about larger emotional harmony and peace, and creative forms of personal liberation. The wide reach and the collective unity they bring about among all of us is especially needed in the trying times right now. As a materials enthusiast, this website is just an attempt at popularizing a fun approach towards materials science and deconvoluting some mechanisms behind their working. I have plans to expand this that have not materialized yet, but have some exciting developments, so watch out for this space! If nothing at best, just take a look and have fun!
This site is dedicated to all those interested in this pursuit.
Love ❤️
– Shan
