Texas ECE PhD student Alexander Ware has been awarded an National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship from the Department of Defense for 2022. The NSDEG program is "a competitive fellowship that is awarded to U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, and U.S. dual citizens who intend to pursue a Doctoral degree aligned to the DoD services Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) in research and development at a U.S. institution of their choice." The DoD NDSEG Fellowship Program, was established in 1989 by direction of Congress and sponsored by the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force.

Alexander Ware received his bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of California Santa Barbara where he worked as an undergraduate researcher with the UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group on the development of Ytterbium-doped fiber amplifiers for use in directed energy systems. He is a first year PhD student at Texas ECE working with the UT Mid-IR Photonics Lab run under the supervision of Prof. Dan Wasserman.

Currently, he is working with collaborators at Sandia National Labs on the development of novel bolometric sensors. Bolometers are devices which absorb energy from incident radiation, changing some property of the bolometer (usually resistance) that can then be read out electrically. We are designing bolometer architectures where we can control the absorption (and emission) of infrared light as a function of wavelength, angle, and polarization. He is also working, in collaboration with groups at Purdue, UMass Lowell, and UVa, on developing new types of composite materials where we can control the interaction of electromagnetic fields with quantum engineered optical transitions. The goal is to study light-matter interaction beyond the classical dipole approximation.