Michael Deagen (Ph.D., December 2018) recently received the Rensselaer Founders Award of Excellence at the Honors Convocation ceremony on October 20, 2018. Established in 1994, the Founders Award "honors students who embody qualities of creativity, discovery, leadership, and the values of pride and responsibility at Rensselaer."
Michael Deagen completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer under the guidance of Prof. Chaitanya Ullal and co-adviser Prof. Linda Schadler. During his work at Rensselaer within the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA), he worked on low-cost fabrication of micro- and nano-scale structures of optical materials through layer-by-layer stamping with a focus on nanoscale wetting and adhesion phenomena. Prior to joining Rensselaer, Michael received his B.S. in Materials Engineering from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where he developed a solar-recharged light and mobile phone charger for developing countries. As an intern in the Interior Lighting Development department at BMW in Munich, Germany and as a consultant for NEXT Lighting in San Francisco, CA, Michael worked on applications for color-tunable LED lighting. He hopes that his Ph.D. research at Rensselaer on low-cost stamping at the nanoscale will someday translate into efficient color-mixing optical waveguide technology for color-tunable lighting systems.