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M.S., Materials Science

Boston University

• GPA 3.94

B.S. Materials Science; Minor, Computer Science, with Honors

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• GPA 3.6
• Selected coursework
  • Discrete Structures
  • Data Structures
  • System Programming
  • Numerical Methods
  • Database Systems

Personal Projects and Self-education in Deep Reinforcement Learning

• Applied MPO, PPO to habit formation, photonic device design, and robot air hockey.
• Reimplemented Vanilla PG, DQN, TRPO, PPO (began with OpenAI Spinning Up)
• Took David Silver course on RL, currently reading Sutton & Barto, and Agarwal, Jiang, et al.
• Studied deep learning foundations from Andrew Ng's Coursera courses
  • Deep Learning Specialization (MLPs, CNNs, best practices)
  • NLP Specialization (Attention and Transformers)
  • GAN Specialization

PDK Engineer

Analog Photonics

• Studied higher-order mode coupling to second order microring filter for device redesign.
• Recentered PDK designs based on measured fabrication offsets, documented device performance.

Graduate Researcher

Popović Group, Photonics Center, Boston University

• Designed and demonstrated silicon photonic microring-based photon pair source.
• Device improves four-wave mixing efficiency by tuning ring dispersion, and sets the purity and escape efficiency of the output photon pairs by setting coupling to each ring resonance with a 2-point coupler.
• Developed a custom finite difference frequency domain Maxwell's equations solver in MATLAB.

Photonic Automation Engineer

Analog Photonics

• Developed edge-coupled electro-optical testing of photonic chips on 300mm silicon wafer.
• Wrote back-end and GUI for CM300 wafer prober for 6-axis optical alignment and fiber array attach.
• Wrote internal messaging system code for optical phased array-based LiDAR.
• Studied higher-order mode coupling to second order microring filter for device redesign.

Process Engineer

IPG Photonics

• Redesigned station and wrote C# program to align volume Bragg gratings (VBG) for wavelength stabilization of laser diodes.
• Wrote C# program for automated scribing of laser bars.

Undergraduate Researcher

Lyding Group, Beckman Institute, UIUC

• Studied charge density waves in TaS2 and graphene nano-ribbons with scanning tunneling microscopy (STM).
• Determined topography, local electron density, and band structure.

Stretchable Electronics Research

John Rogers Group, Materials Research Laboratory, UIUC

• Determined electrical response of different device geometries under mechanical strain.
• Fabricated Au-based stretchable electronics in cleanroom. Photolithography, PVD, RIE.

• K.M. Jabon, I. Wang, M.A. Popovic,
  Dispersion-compensated microring photon pair source design with tunable purity-pair rate-heralding efficiency tradeoff,
  in Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2022, San Jose, CA, USA, 2022, pp. 1-2.

• K.M. Jabon, C.V. Poulton, ..., D. Atlas, M.R. Watts and E. Timurdogan,
  Edge-coupled Active and Passive Wafer-Scale Measurements on 300mm Silicon Photonics Wafers,
  in Proceedings of the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2021, OSA Technical Digest, paper M3A.1.

• Boston University Dean's Scholarship ($30,000 - half tuition)

• UIUC College of Engineering Grant for Academic Excellence ($10,000)
• UIUC James Scholar and Rakers Scholar