Mona Ebrish, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty recognizing exceptional promise in both research and education.
The award will support Ebrish’s project, “CAREER: Unlocking Programmable Doping in Wide-Bandgap Materials.”
Wide-bandgap semiconductors such as gallium nitride are critical for next-generation electronic and power technologies but controlling doping in these materials remains a major challenge. Doping—the introduction of impurities to tailor electrical behavior—is essential for forming low-resistance contacts, defining junctions, and enabling high-performance device operation.
Ebrish’s CAREER project focuses on developing new strategies for programmable doping in wide-bandgap materials. By creating methods to control where and how dopants are introduced after material growth, the work aims to expand the design space for semiconductor devices and overcome longstanding limitations in device fabrication.
The project also connects doping innovation with Ebrish’s broader vision for heterogeneous integration. By engineering materials and interfaces more deliberately, her research seeks to enable heterogeneous integration through more homogeneous, better-controlled interfaces that improve device performance, thermal management, and reliability.
“Doping is central to nearly every aspect of semiconductor device design, yet in wide-bandgap materials we still lack the level of control that modern device architectures demand,” said Ebrish, who also holds secondary appointments in chemical and biomolecular engineering and physics. “My goal is to develop programmable doping strategies that give us new freedom in how we design, fabricate, and ultimately integrate these materials into future electronic platforms.”
Ebrish’s research group studies semiconductor materials and devices for next-generation electronics, with a particular emphasis on wide-bandgap semiconductors, programmable doping, and heterogeneous integration. Her work aims to create new materials and engineering strategies that support more efficient, reliable, and scalable electronic platforms.