Hi there! My name is Akshay Agrawal. I am doing my PhD at Purdue University, working in ‘Quantum Matter and Devices Lab’. For my PhD, currently I am working on developing a recipe for growing single crystal Cuprous Oxide (Cu2O) for Rydberg Excitonic studies. Cuprous Oxide is an ideal platform for building solid-state quantum photonic devices because it can host highly excited Rydberg Excitons. I will talk more about my research in a separate blog post.
I hail from the small city of Durg, Chhattisgarh, India. I lived in Durg for pretty much my whole life before coming to the US in 2021. Chhattisgarh is known as the ‘rice bowl of Central India’. It also has the third largest coal reserves in India and provides electricity to many other states. Bhilai, the twin city of Durg, is famous for Bhilai Steel Plant which is the only steel plant in India to manufacture 260m long steel rails. I am proud to call the land of Chhattisgarh my Mahtari (motherland).
My broad research interests are quantum matter and devices, material growth and semiconductor devices. I completed my bachelor’s in Electronics and Communication Engineering in 2020 from National Institute of Technology, Raipur, India where I did some research on design of Static random-access memory cells. After a gap of one year, I joined Penn State for my MS in Electrical Engineering in 2021. There, I worked in Dr. Thomas Jackson’s research group on ‘Fabrication and Electrical Testing of Zinc Oxide Thin-Film Transistors’. After completing my MS in 2023, I joined Purdue.
In my leisure time, I like to play bass guitar. I also listen to a lot of Indie music. Some of my favorite artists are Naalayak, The Yellow Diary, Deepak Rathore Project and Sanskar Vaidya.
AKSHAY AGRAWAL 