ECE Names 2025-2026 Distinguished Dissertation Fellows

The Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering (ECE) recently named their 2025-2026 Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship awardees. The Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship is a departmental award recognizing outstanding students in the final stages of their dissertation work and seeks to provide both a financial award and recognition of the student's research excellence. The following author’s dissertations were selected by a search committee comprised of ECE faculty members Richard La, Sahil Shah, Andre Tits, Uzi Vishkin and Howard Milchberg.

Sagnik Bhattacharya

Advised by Prakash Narayan

Dissertation Title: Global computation from local information: classical and quantum

Bhattacharya’s research addresses a fundamental challenge in our increasingly networked world: how to efficiently process vast amounts of spatially correlated data under real-world constraints on communication, computation, and storage. Drawing on graphical models---mathematical tools that capture how nearby elements in a network influence one another---his dissertation develops a unified framework applicable to diverse systems, from mobile networks and robot swarms to the Internet-of-Things and emerging quantum networks.

A central thrust of the dissertation is an analysis of shared information, a measure that generalizes Claude Shannon's celebrated concept of mutual information to multiple data sources. The theory of shared information is developed across five interconnected directions: new models for secure network common randomness generation, quantum analogues for entanglement distillation, structural simplifications that make computation of shared information in graphical models tractable, data-driven statistical estimation methods, and fundamental limits for spatial data sampling and compression. Together, these results offer both theoretical insights and practical tools for the design of next-generation communication and sensing systems.

Shanchuan Liang

Advised by Cheng Gong

Dissertation Title: Magnetoelectric Effects in Two-Dimensional Multiferroic Heterostructures

Modern electronic devices increasingly require faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient ways to store and process information. Liang’s research addresses this challenge by developing voltage-controlled approaches to manipulate magnetic states in atomically thin materials. By integrating two-dimensional magnets with ferroelectric materials, his work demonstrates reversible, non-volatile control of magnetic properties by switching ferroelectric polarizations. His dissertation further investigates the interfacial mechanisms driving this magnetoelectric coupling, specifically how ferroelectric polarization modifies magnetic behavior in carefully designed multiferroic heterostructures. His work provides insights into the interplay between ferroelectric and ferromagnetic orders and points toward future low-power memory, logic, and spintronic devices.

Sahan Liyanaarachchi

Advised by Sennur Ulukus

Dissertation Title: Freshness-Based Remote Estimation and Control

Liyanaarachchi’s work focuses on leveraging metrics such as age of information (AoI), age of incorrect information (AoII) and binary freshness (BF), to design freshness-based control policies for remote estimation. In particular, his research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical abstraction and real-world utility by studying these systems under practical constraints such as feedback delays, sample-dependent channel delays and multi-path transmissions, which are frequently overlooked in contemporary literature. The core of his research draws inspiration from areas such as queuing theory, Markov decision processes, stochastic control and optimization, to design sampling and control policies for a wide array of applications spanning from edge computing to cislunar communications.

Sydney Overton

Advised by Reza Ghodssi

Dissertation Title: An Ingestible Capsule for Gastrointestinal Serotonin Sensing to Investigate the Gut-Brain Axis

Overton’s research focuses on developing a fully-integrated system to investigate serotonin dynamics, enabling quantitative investigation of underlying mechanisms in the gut-brain axis (GBA). Specifically, she has developed an ingestible device for measuring serotonin in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, facilitating greater insights into how the brain and GI tract are interconnected. The research entails the design, fabrication, and characterization of an ingestible capsule, a small device designed to be swallowed, that repeatedly deploys sensors and performs electrochemical measurements to profile serotonin concentrations throughout the intestines. The work utilizes electrochemical sensing to detect serotonin in the GI tract, printed circuit board (PCB) electronics for onboard, wireless measurements, and leverages 3D printing to fabricate customized, miniaturized mechanisms and packaging for the ingestible device

Supratik Sarkar

Advised by Mohammad Hafezi

Dissertation Title:
Intersection of many-body physics and photonics: 2D semiconductors and PICs

Through his dissertation, Sarkar explores the intersection of many-body physics and photonics. While the toolbox of photonics provides powerful means to probe, manipulate, and even simulate matter, insights from many-body physics can, in turn, guide the design of devices with desirable optical properties. In this pursuit, he uses two complementary material platforms: (i) atomically-thin transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors, where strong excitonic interactions and moiré superlattices enable emergent many-body phenomena; and (ii) CMOS-compatible silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits, where topology and nonlinearity give rise to a new regime of exploring topological photonic devices for practical applications.

(i) First, he proposes and experimentally demonstrates a sub-wavelength two-dimensional chiral flat-band nanocavity using two atomically thin TMD mirrors with degenerate resonances. Second, he explores the interplay between fermionic and bosonic populations in a lattice, using a TMD heterobilayer device that hosts this hybrid particle density. Third, he overcomes the challenges of limited spatial resolution and the efficiency of light-matter interaction stemming from uniform and diffraction-limited free-space optics by using metasurface plasmon polaritons (MPPs) to form a sub-wavelength optical lattice on a TMD monolayer.

(ii) Finally, he designs and experimentally investigates the field of topological nonlinear photonics on the industry-ready silicon nitride platform. His approach provides possibilities for integrated frequency conversion and synchronization, self-referencing, precision metrology, squeezed-light sources, and nonlinear optical computing.

Published May 28, 2026