Paul Joseph Awarded Fulbright Specialist Grant to India

Paul Joseph, a principal research scientist in the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) at Georgia Tech, has received a Fulbright Specialist Award to India from the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Joseph will spend two weeks at the Indian Institute of Information technology (IIIT) this summer helping to expand the nanotechnology curriculum and assisting with faculty and student skill development at IIIT.

Joseph will bring more than 25 years of research and teaching experience in an academic setting to his host institution. In his current role at IEN, Joseph serves as the director of external user programs for the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC) and manages and facilitates external research projects for academic and industry users of the NSF-funded National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) shared user labs. He also teaches a short course in soft lithography for microfluidics, coordinates the NanoFANS Forum, and conducts collaborative research with other faculty colleagues at Georgia Tech in micro- and nanotechnology.

Recently, Joseph received his MBA specializing in technology innovation and commercialization from the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech. He was also elected as IEN’s representative to the Georgia Tech Interdisciplinary Research Faculty Advisory Council. He plans to share his knowledge, specifically in nano- and microelectronics, fabrication methodologies, and nanomaterial characterization, through lectures and daily mentoring hours for IIIT students.

“My lectures on important topics will expose the students to the benefits of nanotechnology and will help widen their knowledge and skills in the field,” explained Joseph. “I hope this will help them explore career opportunities in nanoscale science and technology, which are expanding rapidly due to their increasing impact on many aspects of our daily lives.

“Nanotechnology offers the potential for tremendous advancements in the development of commercial products in electronics, energy, healthcare, the environment, and food, just to name a few,” he added. “It is one of the most powerful emerging and enabling technologies in the world, and Indian industries have started realizing the commercial viability of nanotechnology quite recently. Because of this, it is one of the hottest career options available to Indian engineering/science graduates.”

Joseph also hopes to create lasting relationships with the faculty at IIIT that will last beyond this visit. He plans to conduct group lectures and discussion sessions with faculty members on student engagement, course design for transformative education, best practices to gain research funding, how to design and lead a collaborative research team, and technology commercialization assessments for potential start-ups.

Beyond the benefits to Georgia Tech and IIIT, Joseph, who is a native of India, expects to benefit personally as well. “I see this as a great opportunity to participate in cross-cultural professional development, gain international exposure, and use my many years of experience in a new and a creative way,” he said. “It is a great opportunity to share my expertise and life experiences with overseas counterparts and learn about my field of research from a new perspective. I am very excited for this opportunity to give back to the country where I was born.”