People
Dr. Eric Johlin
Dr. Johlin is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Materials Engineering department at Western.
He received his Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 2009, performing research on the characterisation of electron energy distributions in ion thrusters at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during his time at Caltech.
He went on to do his Masters of Science and Doctoral degrees co-advised in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science departments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, finishing in 2014, with his thesis entitled "Understanding and Improving Hole Transport in Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon."
His post-doctoral work was performed at AMOLF's Center for Nanophotonics in Amsterdam for three years following his PhD, where he worked on fabrication, characterisation, and modelling of nanostructured photovoltaics.
He joined the University of Western Ontario as faculty in March of 2018.
Students
PhD
Didulani Salwathura Acharige
 dsalwath@uwo.ca |
Didulani is a graduate of University of Colombo, Sri Lanka where she received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics. Didulani began her graduate studies in the group in September 2019. Her project is looking at ways to utilize machine learning and artificial neural networks to improve the algorithmic design of nanophotonic structures. |
MESc
Kate Lochhead
| Kate is an MESc student working in collaboration with the London NRC. Her work focuses on coatings for perovskite photovoltaic devices to improve stability against environmental degradation. |
Alex Wang
| Alex is an MESc student working on designs and improvements to a custom built multi-photon 3D nanolithography system. |
Undergraduate Students
Michael Avrakh
Former Students
Seyed Soroush Sadatifar
 ssadatif@uwo.ca |
Soroush graduated with his B.Sc. in mechanical engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM). He started his MESc degree in January of 2019. His research interests include solar energy, nanophotonics, nanotechnology, and renewable energy systems. He completed his MESc degree on optimizations of photovoltaics for building integrated photovoltaics, as well as improved designs of solar cell contact configurations in 2020, and is now working as an engineerin at Solaires. |
Amandine Drew
 adrew5@uwo.ca |
Amandine is a graudate of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. She is passionate about renewable energy and excited by the field of photovoltaics and how potential applications can positively impact the planet we call home. Her thesis project investigated ways that structuring the surface and back contacts of solar cells can improve their optical properties, and thereby efficiencies. She is currently pursuing her Master's degree at UBC. |
Alaa Boucher
| Alaa is a graduate of the Mechatronic Systems Engineering program. Her work in the lab focused on improvements to evolutionary algorithms for automated design of nanophotonic devices, in particular finding new ways to include new constraints enforcing fabrication limits on the geometries produced by the algorithms. |
