People – Cornell SonicMEMS Lab

Prof. Amit Lal
Principal Investigator
Phillips Hall 120
Ithaca, NY 14853
amit.lal@cornell.edu

Prof. Lal obtained his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 1990. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted his doctoral research at the Berkeley Sensors and Actuators Center in the area of ultrasonic MEMS. After working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor, he is now a professor at Cornell University, in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He holds >30 patents and has published >190 research papers in the area of microsystem engineering. He has served as a Program Manager at DARPA in the Microsystems Technology Office, from 2005-2009. At DARPA he managed ten and started six new programs in the area of navigation, low-energy computation, bio-robotics, and atomic microsystems. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the Whitaker Foundation Award. With his students, he has won several best paper awards at the IEEE Ultrasonics and Frequency Control Symposium, and IEEE NEMS conferences. He is also a recipient of the Department of Defense Exceptional Service Award, and a Best Program Manager Award for his work at DARPA.

The current focus of his research is on: (1) Gigahertz Ultrasonic for chip-scale communications, sensing, and computation, (2) Near zero power sensors for long-lifetime IoT, (3) Ultrasonic inertial sensors and self-calibration (4) Long term stable sensors that utilize laser locked to optical transitions of alkali metals as Constant-of-Nature on-chip, (5) Bulk PZT sensors and actuators, and (6) Chip-scale manipulation of electron and ion beams.

In addition to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Prof. Lal is a field member of Biomedical Engineering, Applied Engineering Physics, Mechanical, and Aerospace Engineering Departments.