Margaret Murnane

Yuka Esashi has been announced as the 2021 recipient of the $10,000 Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and Mentor Graphics, a Siemens Business, for her potential contributions to the field related to advanced lithography.  Esashi is pursuing her PhD in physics at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Kapteyn-Murnane group. She is co-lead of a research team that is addressing much-needed advances in metrology techniques for the semiconductor industry, where techniques with high resolution, fidelity and sensitivity are needed. With her team, Esashi has developed phase-sensitive EUV imaging reflectometry, a novel technique which combines computational imaging with EUV reflectometry to measure depth-dependent chemical composition of semiconductor samples in a spatially-resolved and non-destructive manner. In her current research, she is planning on applying this technique to a wider range of next-generation structures and materials. Esashi received her BA in Physics from Reed College in 2017, and her MS in Physics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2019.

Congratulations to Yuka Esashi for Being Selected as a Winner of the 2020 Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA) Poster Contest. Yuka’s poster title is, “Phase-Sensitive EUV Imaging Reflectometer for Depth-Dependent Composition Determination.”

Jorge Nicolás (Nico) Hernández Charpak received the 2020 University of Colorado President’s Diversity Award. He was nominated by the STROBE SUPER team. This annual award recognizes significant achievements of faculty*, staff, students, and academic or administrative units in developing a culturally and intellectually diverse university community reflective of inclusive excellence.