ECE Summit Day 2023 – Industry Moderator and Panel Bios

Moderator

Mike Peters, RF Segment Solutions, Applied Materials | ICAPS

Mike is a 1987 Masters graduate from the ECE Dept and studied under Evelyn Hu. Since graduating he has held various engineering, supply chain, marketing and business development positions with TriQuint Semiconductor, Qorvo, GlobalFoundries and currently Applied Materials. His focus has been in the semiconductor manufacturing and foundry space; his home base is Portland, OR. He’s had ongoing connections with the ECE department through supervising shared semiconductor product manufacturing runs with student and faculty designs through TriQuint/Qorvo and GlobalFoundries.

Industry Panelists

Aruna Jammalamadaka, HRL, Malibu (BS/MS/PhD, UCSB)

Aruna Jammalamadaka is a Scientist V at HRL Laboratories, LLC where she works on applied research problems in the intersection of causal inference and machine learning. She has been a program manager and principal investigator on multiple internally and externally funded programs for government and commercial agencies. She is the author of 30+ publications, patents, and patents pending. Prior to joining HRL she worked for Social Intelligence, a start-up company focused on performing 3rd party background checks from publicly available data for employment, insurance, and security clearance screenings. She received her BS in electrical engineering (2006), MS in signal processing and communication with a minor in computational science (2007) and PhD ("Spatial pattern modeling and discovery in biological images", 2014) from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Primit Parikh, Co-founder, Transphorm, Santa Barbara (MS/PhD, UCSB)

Primit Parikh, Co-founder & President, Transphorm co-leads the company, a pioneer and leader in GaN Power Semiconductors. Having recently led Transphorm to a public company listing partnering with it’s phenomenal team, he is passionate about creating value from the intersection of business and technology. With over 25 years of semiconductor & entrepreneurial experience, his background includes capital raises, international markets & strategic partnerships, key customer relationships, products & manufacturing, IP, GaN/Semiconductor technology and government contracting. Prior to Transphorm, Primit led GaN electronics at Nitres Inc. through its acquisition by Cree, where he held several leadership roles. Primit received his B.Tech. from IIT, Mumbai and Ph.D. in ECE from UCSB. He has more than 40 patents awarded and co-authored more than 75 publications, presentations and resides in the amazing Santa Barbara area with his wonderful family.

Sandeep Gupta, VP Amazon Payments (BS, UCSB)

Sandeep Gupta has over 30 years of experience delivering industry-changing consumer and professional products. He is currently Vice President of Amazon Payment Products and Services. He previously served as Vice President and General Manager for Amazon Fire TV. There he built Fire TV into the leading global content streaming device with over 150M devices sold globally and expanded the business by building relationships with partners such as Best Buy, TCL, BMW, and Fiat/Chrysler to include distribution on Smart TVs, Soundbar and Automotive. He led product engineering as well as monetization and the overall business strategy for the Amazon Fire TV product line. His prior roles include leadership positions at Yahoo!, Digidesign, and Apple (APPL), where he helped reshape music distribution with the iPod. He has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCSB.

Yulun Wang, Teledoc Health, Santa Barbara. (PhD, UCSB)

Dr. Wang is a Fellow at Teladoc Health (NYSE: TDOC) where he contributes various R&D initiatives, and the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility efforts. He is co-founder and chairman of Maxcess Health, which is working to enable broad-based tele-surgery, and is co-founder and chairman of World Telehealth Initiative, a non-profit that uses volunteer clinicians and telemedicine to deliver sustained healthcare expertise to impoverished areas of the world.

Dr. Wang founded InTouch Health in 2003, and served as Chairman & CEO until 2016, when he assumed the position of Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer. InTouch Health was acquired by Teladoc Health in July, 2020, for $1.1 billion. Previous to InTouch, Dr. Wang founded Computer Motion in 1990, the company which pioneered surgical robotics. He was the inventor of the voice-controlled robotic arm called AESOP, the first FDA-cleared surgical robot, as well as the ZEUS robotic surgical system, which performed the world’s first transatlantic surgery. Computer Motion IPO’d in 1997 and merged with Intuitive Surgical (NASD: ISRG) in 2003 for one third of the resulting company. Dr. Wang is author to more than 50 technical publications and inventor on over 200 patents. Dr. Wang served on the board of directors of Hoag Memorial Hospital in Newport Beach, CA from 2008 to 2015, and served on the board of the American Telemedicine Association from 2010 to 2016, including as President from 2014 to 2015. Dr. Wang serves on the board of WellAir since 2015. Dr. Wang serves on the board of Cottage Health System (since 2020), Santa Barbara, California. He has served for many years on the advisory boards of the Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Mechanical Engineering Departments of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Wang has received many awards, including the 2017 IEEE Medal for Healthcare Innovation, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011. Dr. Wang earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1988.

Douglas Fouts, Professor and Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA (PhD, UCSB)

Douglas Fouts is the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He has served at the NPS since 1990 as an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, Associate Dean of Research, and Interim Vice President and Dean of Research. He has industrial experience working for Burroughs Corp. (now Unisys) and The Aerospace Corp. He received the PhD in 1990 and the MS in 1984 in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara. He received the bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 1980 from UC Berkeley. He is also a registered Professional Electrical Engineer in the state of California.

Alexander Fang, Co-founder & Managing Partner, Entrada Ventures (MS/PhD, UCSB)

Alex is an entrepreneur with a track record of building teams that take ideas from the research laboratory through commercialization. He is a co–founder and Managing Partner of Entrada Ventures, an early stage VC firm on the California central coast. Alex leads many of Entrada’s hard tech investments, including in photonics, nanoscale materials, next-gen motors, and disruptive computing. He currently serves as a board director for Quintessent, Coreshell Technologies, and board observer for D-Matrix, Anari, and Titan Haptics.

Prior to Entrada Ventures, Alex was co-founder, CEO, and Board Director of Aurrion from 2008 – 2016, a UCSB Spinout and fabless semiconductor company that developed photonic integrated circuits for use in data center networking applications. The business was acquired by Juniper Networks.

Alex has authored/coauthored over 80 papers in the field (h-index – 34), co-authored 3 book chapters and has filed/been granted 18 patents. Dr. Fang earned his B.S. Electrical Engineering with minors in Math and Physics from San Jose State University (03) and M.S & Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara (05, 08). He is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School (HBS) Owner/President Management Program (OPM) and is a member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO).