Who am I?

I’m a researcher working on EUV lithography – a critical step in microchip manufacturing – at imec, Belgium. Lithography (literally, to write on stone) is the process of making extremely small patterns on Silicon wafers as accurately and as precisely as possible. Smaller patterns can help squeeze more electronics into a single chip, which means more computing power with similar (or even reduced) energy consumption. My team’s research is focused on studying new materials (photoresists, underlayers etc) that can enable smaller and smaller patterns on chips.

For my Ph.D., I was working on interdisciplinary research, trying to understand if we can use computer chip technology to sense DNA and proteins faster and more economically than conventional methods.

With a background in microelectronics and semiconductor chip technology, I have worked in various applied and fundamental scientific fields, to enable interdisciplinary research and cross-collaboration. I look forward to further expansion of my expertise towards sustainable semiconductor chip technology development.

Other than working on semiconductor research, I am also interested in music, art, literature, travelling, and occasionally writing on random topics that pop up in my head.

On a different note, here is how one of my favorite poems ends:

…
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.


‘Enigma’ by Pablo Neruda
(Translated by Robert Bly)