News: Microelectronics
4 August 2025
Cornell’s Tian selected for DARPA Director’s Fellowship award
Zhiting Tian, a professor in Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been selected as the recipient of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director’s Fellowship Award, a selective award given annually to the top performers in the DARPA Young Faculty Award pool.
As a recipient of the Director’s Fellowship, she receives an additional year of funding to continue her DARPA research. The additional year will provide $500,000 in funding, bringing the total for the project over three years to $1m.
Tian’s initial DARPA Young Faculty Award was granted in 2023 for her project ‘Transient, nanoscale temperature mapping of active RF devices’, which tackles the problem of how to create temperature maps of active radio frequency (RF) devices accurately and in real-time. Additional funding will allow Tian and her group to continue their work on this important process.
RF modules are a key part of defense-related communications and operations. A current limitation on RF devices is the inability of gallium nitride (GaN) to perform well under the large power output densities required for longer-range communications, as they get too hot.
Having in-situ temperature maps of active RF devices will help researchers to understand where to focus their efforts to make GaN and other semiconductors more reliable and efficient at the larger power output densities required.
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Government support is crucial. It allows us to take on bold and hard projects like this one that are high-risk, high-reward, and won’t be possible otherwise,” says Tian. Her research group has more than 20 postdocs, Ph.D., Masters and undergraduate students, and the additional year of funding from the DARPA Director’s Fellowship will allow her to continue to train the next generation of engineers and researchers.
Tian, who joined the Sibley School faculty in 2018, has previously received an NSF CAREER Award (2017), an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award (2018), a NASA Early Stage Innovations Award (2021), an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award (2021), and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2025). She was elected a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2019.
