Alumni News

Professor Pratibha Dev is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Howard University, Washington D.C. Since joining Howard, she has been awarded a W. M. Keck Foundation Research grant and received the prestigious NSF CAREER award to study properties of novel quantum materials using state-of-the-art first principles computational methods. She received her PhD in Prof. Peihong Zhang's group in 2009. She went on to do research in the group of Prof. Niall English in University College, Dublin, Ireland as an EMPOWER fellow, and in Thomas Reinecke's group in Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C. as a National Research Council fellow. 

Ali Alsaqqa, PhD, was born in Palestine where he obtained a degree in Electrical Engineering. Upon graduation, he worked as a microwave engineer in a telecom company. However, he always had interests to learn Physics dating back to his high school years. As a result, and while working in a full-time job, he started attending advanced courses with physics majors at a local university out of his own interest. He then decided to pursue his passion and obtain a graduate degree in physics. He joined UB physics as a Fulbright scholar working in Prof. Ganapathy's research group studying nanoscale materials. Upon graduation in 2017, he joined Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (ASML) working on optical sensors for lithography machines, and in 2021, he joined Apple Inc. and currently working on touch sensors for their mobile phones.