Erik Cheng Email & Phone Number

Livermore, California, United States

Computational chemistry method development and applications to chemistry under extreme conditions

Austin, Texas Area

Ab initio calculations to understand materials properties and surface chemistry in the group of Dr. Gyeong Hwang.

Austin, Texas, United States

First principles modelling of plasma based semiconductor etch processes and ML for prediction and characterization of simulation data at scale.

Berkeley, CA

• As a UGSI, I was responsible for teaching a lab section of 25 students, including both conceptual lectures and guiding students through hands on lab practice. Also have course admin tasks including office hours.
• Assist in course content creation; editing and proofreading questions, debugging and testing coding questions.
• Grade assignments and answer student questions in office hours, labs, and through the online class forum Piazza.

-Organized and ran multiple World Cube Association sanctioned competitions, with attendance upwards of 150 people per event -Along with other board members, responsible for communicating on behalf of the club with community members-Along with other facilitators, responsible for running the student taught course (known as a DeCal) on solving the Rubik's.

Emeryville, California

• Improved permeance model of nanoporous films, implemented in Python for application to data.
• Developed an automated process that allowed for batch curve fitting, identifying features of interest in noisy data and using sklearn and numpy to fit modeled curves to data for feature extraction.
• Improved theoretical model of current generated in anodization.
• Designed and conducted experiments to determine effect of two step anodization on film characteristics.
• Characterized films with Wyko profilometry and various imaging tools, including skimage and ImageJ.
• Communicated results in multiple weekly meetings using Jupyter notebooks and matplotlib visualizations.

Berkeley, CA

Joined team in the Data Science for Social Good group through BIDS to work with Thousand Currents (a nonprofit organization dedicated to social justice). Cleaned Salesforce data and providing business insights through analysis of donor data. Created a Shiny app for clients to more intuitively access and read data acquired from Salesforce.

• As a tutor in the past, I led classroom-style tutoring sessions for small groups of students (5 each) as an extension to Data 8. Prepared lectures and created unique content (ipython notebooks with questions and code.
• Select and clean large data sets from online sources as material in instructional materials.
• Worked under supervision of Prof. Denero in enhancement of various functionalities in datascience, an custom software package developed specifically for the teaching of this course. Also wrote and deployed new.

UC Berkeley

• In Saykally Group, College of Chemistry.
• Researching effects of solutes and surfactants on the kinetics of water evaporation using Raman thermometry.
• Responsible for maintaining and operating a Raman laser spectroscopy setup; ensure optimal signal collection by maintenance and setup of lenses, fiber optics, Class IV Ar+ laser, and CCD.
• Maintain and operate vacuum chamber, liquid pump and microjet ensemble for droplet train generation and study.
• Practice quantitative acid/base chemistry in preparation of solutions for study.

Albuquerque, New Mexico Area

• Used electrical analysis and optical microscopy techniques (Keyence software) to develop a reliable process for quantifying results of aluminum anodization and etching process. Reduced uncertainty by a factor of ~10.
• Was responsible for maintenance and operation of the anodization setup. Used results of analysis to optimize process factors such as bath temperature, acidity, and etch times.
• Created electrodeposited patterns of gold on a nickel substrate, studying the effect of varying factors in template creation, strikes, and electrodeposition bath. Worked in Class 100 clean room using photolithography.
• Analyzed structures using specialized optical microscopy software and profilometer readings.

• Analyzed synthetic crystals based on elemental properties and physical features using SEM and EDX techniques.
• Tested and debugged code for Arduino units for use in a physics summer camp.
• Constructed and tested go-carts for use in a physics summer camp.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Materials Science

Master Of Science - Ms, Statistics

Bachelor Of Science (Bs), Chemistry

High School Diploma

Activities and Societies: FIRST Robotics Competition robotics team, FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team, bassoon performance, violin.