Mona Jarrahi awarded a DARPA Young Faculty Award

Prof. Mona Jarrahi has been awarded a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for her research project, “Plasmonics-Enabled Ultra-Short Carrier Lifetime Photoconductors for High Power Terahertz Generation.”

This project seeks to develop a new generation of compact high power terahertz sources. Towards this goal, the unique capabilities of plasmonic photoconductors will be utilized to suppress the thermal breakdown and the carrier screening effect limitations of conventional photoconductive terahertz sources.

Prof. Jarrahi joined University of Michigan in Fall 2008 after receiving her M.S and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She is the recipient of Robert Bosch FMA fellowship and has received the first-place and the third-place student paper award at the International Microwave Symposium (2007 and 2008). Her research interests include Terahertz Electronics and Applications; Microwave Photonics; and Millimeter-wave/RF MEMS. In her first year at U-M, 2009-2010, she taught an undergraduate course in Electromagnetics, and developed a graduate level special topics course entitled, “Terahertz Technology and Applications.”

About the DARPA Young Faculty Award

The DARPA Young Faculty Award program is intended to identify and engage rising research stars in junior faculty positions in academia, and provide high-impact funding in order to develop their research ideas in the context of Department of Defense needs. DARPA is looking for research focusing on innovations that will enable revolutionary advances in selected areas. High-risk/high-payoff ideas are strongly encouraged.