Tara Pena
Stanford University
tara.pena@stanford.edu
Bio
Tara Pena is an NSF MPS-Ascend postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where she works with Prof. Eric PopÕs group in Electrical Engineering. Her research interests involve examining two-dimensional materials for emerging (opto)electronic devices. She received her Ph.D. (2023) in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Rochester, where she won the university-wide ProvoståÕs Fellowship then the nation-wide NSF GRFP award. Before obtaining her doctorate, she earned a M.S. degree in ECE from the University of Rochester (2019) and a B.S. degree in Physics from Adelphi University (2017).
Areas of Research
- Materials and Devices
Strain Engineered Low-Dimensional Materials for Emerging Nanoelectronics
Strain engineering has been a critical ingredient in enhancing CMOS performance with device scaling over the past two decades. Now that geometric scaling Si transistors is coming to an end, there is a need to explore such manufacturable engineering techniques on new material systems and devices to continue computational advancements. Low-dimensional materials are promising contenders for emerging technologies due to their excellent (opto)electronic properties at atomic-thickness. Moreover, low-dimensional are ideal candidates for strain engineering due to their high elastic limits and variety of strain-tunable properties (e.g., bandgap, mobility, etc.) Low-dimensional materials uniquely have (strong) covalent bonds in-plane and (weak) out-of-plane van der Waals bonds, therefore they introduce new opportunities and challenges in strain design. My research goals include unraveling interfacial adhesion parameters between low-dimensional material and other relevant materials (gate dielectrics, contacts, etc) to gain optimal control of their fundamental properties through strain.