 It's
a Small, Small World
When Fatima Toor '04 of
Lahore, Pakistan, joined the first class of Picker engineering
students, she brought to the table a keen appreciation of math and
applied sciences; what she did not bring was confidence in her ability
to talk about them in public. She's different now. In the past
four years, she has stood before large gatherings of engineering and
physics students as well as industry managers and professional engineers
and discussed her own undergraduate research, including a presentation
on process optimization for negative photoresists. "I've
changed dramatically," notes Toor, who received a Jean Picker
Fellowship for her engineering studies at Smith.
With a double major
in physics and engineering, Toor is drawn to the emerging
field of nanoelectronics, a combination of nuclear quantum physics
and electronics on a nanometer scale. With countless possible applications
including miniature computers or tiny switches for optical networks,
nanoelectronics seems to be a natural for someone who counts among
her favorite films the 1980s Back to the Future sci-fi trilogy, with
its dramatic and colorfully imagined technologies capable of moving
humans through time and space.
After a summer internship where
she conducted research in electronics optical packaging (for which she won
an IBM award) in the microelectronics lab at IBM's
Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, she says, "I
realized how exciting the [nanoelectronics] field is." She returns to
the same IBM division this summer to continue the work and then goes on this
fall to start her doctoral work in electrical engineering; she has been accepted
at Princeton's
School of Engineering and Applied Science and is waiting word from four other
schools.
"My dream," Toor says, "is to connect research in
nanoelectronics with innovations that will make a big difference to society -- like
the way the Internet revolutionized communications in our culture. I hope my
work in nanoelectronics will accomplish something similar some day." |
