October 11, 2024 Deshpande receives highly regarded Grainger Fellowship Written By: Staff Departments: Electrical & Computer Engineering Categories: Awards|Graduate|Research|Students Sanket Deshpande, PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received a prestigious Grainger Fellowship for graduate researchers. Deshpande works in the research group of Jack St. Clair Kilby Professor Mikhail Kats, where he designs, fabricates, and tests nanophotonic components to generate optical profiles for trapping and manipulating atoms. These systems are used for quantum sensing, communication and computing applications. “It is very exciting to design the fundamental building blocks for the quantum ecosystem,” Deshpande states. Sanket Deshpande is shown here in a cleanroom suit, holding a chip that he fabricated for trapping and cooling atoms. Deshpande earned a bachelor’s degree with a double major in physics and electrical engineering from the Birla Institute of Science & Technology (BITS Pilani) in India, where he led a team to launch India’s first near-space student experiment. Between completing his undergraduate degree and starting his PhD at UW–Madison, he worked at a quantum sensing startup in Singapore. Deshpande has a passion for entrepreneurship, which he brought to UW–Madison. He was the entrepreneurial lead for a successful proposal to NASA’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, to explore commercial applications of quantum sensing, and he participated in the NSF I-Corps program hosted by the Technology and Entrepreneurship Office (TEO) at UW–Madison. A key component of his I-Corps application has been filed as a patent application by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). Deshpande explains, “A startup offers an effective pathway to create a positive impact on the society with your research. I want to encourage more researchers to think about entrepreneurship and commercialization.” He regularly hosts the “Innovators Meetup”, which has helped him form a community of entrepreneurship-focused innovators at UW–Madison. The Grainger Fellowship will help support Deshpande’s research on developing a nanophotonic device with applications in quantum sensing, as he plans his next steps in science and entrepreneurship.