Jin Yong Oh Receives 2015 Munir Award

The UC Davis College of Engineering Awards Committee has presented the 2015 Zuhair A. Munir Best Dissertation Award to Jin Yong “Jackie” Oh, who completed his doctorate in electrical engineering in June 2014. Oh’s dissertation is titled High Throughput Manufacturing of Silicon Nano-bridges for the Fabrication of 3D Gate-All-Around Field Effect Transistors.

The committee also selected Shaxun Chen, who earned his doctorate in computer science in September 2014, for an honorable mention; his dissertation is titled Enhancing Wireless Security Through Cross-Layer Approaches.

The award will be presented during the Student Awards event at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, June 3, 2015 in the Bruce & Marie West Lobby in Kemper Hall. A reception will follow immediately.

Oh earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, cum laude, at Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology, where he focused on transport phenomena, reaction engineering and polymer science. He followed with a master’s degree in materials science and engineering, completed in 2004 at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology. He then spent almost five years at Samsung Semiconductor in Kyeonggido, Korea, where he worked as a Flash memory development engineer.

Oh began his post-graduate work at UC Davis in 2009, under the mentorship of M. Saif Islam, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. As a member of Islam’s Integrated Nanodevices and Nanosystems Research Group, Oh’s work focused on nanomaterial synthesis and nanofabrication; nanowire-based FETS (field-effect transistors), detectors, sensors and photovoltaics; and devices based on ionic transport.

Since July 2014, Oh has been a senior semiconductor device engineer at the Intel Corporation’s facility in Portland, Ore.

Chen earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees in computer science at China’s Nanjing University. He came to UC Davis for his PhD work, where he was mentored by Prasant Mohapatra, a professor in the Department of Computer Science. As a member of Mohapatra’s Network Research Group, Chen’s work focused on improving wireless security by exploiting physical layer characteristics; he proposed and implemented a number of highly innovative methods to defend against security threats in wireless networks and mobile systems.

Since August 2014, Chen has worked as a research scientist at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, Calif.

The Zuhair A. Munir Award, established in 1999, annually honors the individual who has submitted the best doctoral dissertation within the UC Davis College of Engineering. The Awards Committee, currently chaired by Biological and Agricultural Engineering Professor Bruce Hartsough, makes the selection from competitive submissions from the various graduate programs. The award honors the contributions of the College of Engineering’s fifth dean, Zuhair A. Munir, who led the college from 2000–02 and acted as its Associate Dean for Graduate Studies for 20 years.