Eric Chatterjee Email & Phone Number

I have always possessed a passion for analytical problem solving. In particular, the idea of modeling physical systems using quantitative tools has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. This keen interest manifested itself starting in my high school years when I served as president of my school’s Mu Alpha Theta math team and designed complex geometric algorithms using C programming for my school’s robotics team, and it blossomed into the physics research that I ended up undertaking in my years as an undergraduate student at the University of California Berkeley and then a graduate student at Stanford University.My PhD research united optics and condensed matter physics, with a focus on technical applications with regards to nanophotonics/nano-optics. It centered around the optical properties of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (specifically monolayer molybdenum disulfide) in a cavity, with the goal of determining whether the cavity-material complex could be used as a switch in an optical computer. The project involved DFT (density functional theory)-based tight-binding calculations, Matlab-based computing, deriving matrix elements for quantum mechanical operators, and analyzing an open quantum system by deriving Lindblad operators and Heisenberg-Langevin equations based on a Maxwell-Bloch formalism, among other tasks. Further details about the project can be found in the Experience section, and the dissertation is linked in the Project section.Over the years, I have also come to profoundly enjoy the process of passing knowledge and problem solving skills onto others. The 18 quarters that I spent working as a teaching assistant at Stanford University proved to be a highlight of my time as a graduate student. In addition to the sense of gratification that I felt from helping others, it turned out that this experience gave me a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the material that I was teaching, as well as greater confidence in public speaking. I brought the mindset that I acquired from this work into my research group by mentoring newer graduate students, and I look forward to performing similar mentoring roles in my future positions.

Listed skills include Mathematics, Optics, Physics, University Teaching, and 23 others.