Dr. Vega has spent the majority of the last three years performing rapid prototyping and product development for the Department of Defense/US Army Rapid Equipping Force. This time includes eleven months in Afghanistan prototyping and developing solutions to bridge technological or capability gaps for soldiers, allowing them to adapt to a continuously evolving battle space.
Dr. Vega has also over two years of corporate experience in the area of failure analysis focusing in the areas of lithium ion battery failure analysis and system implementation, semiconductor device and integrated circuit failure analysis, ceramic transducer failure analysis, and automobile electronic systems failure analysis. He also gained experience in the area of product refinement with a specialization in battery charging/protection systems and electrical circuit safety.
Albert has over eight years of experience in the area of optics, including specialization in photonic devices, pulse shaping, and RF photonics. He also has over five years of semiconductor fabrication experience with various device materials. He has over 4 years of teaching experience through various courses in preparing personnel for expeditionary engineering along with various optics and electrical engineering topics at the collegiate level.
During his graduate work, Dr. Vega was responsible for the design, simulation, fabrication, and testing of an InP based quantum-well reflection modulator. When implemented within an optical pulse shaper, this allows rapid rate reconfiguration for a wide range of applications such as arbitrary waveform generation (RF and optical), sensing, and material machining. Through this, Dr. Vega gained optic and RF systems design experience with various types of optical/RF test and measurement equipment. He also has experience with a variety of semiconductor equipment, including those configured to perform various kinds of material deposition, etching, lithography, on-wafer electrical measurements, and fabrication metrology. As a result of these research investigations, Dr. Vega has developed expertise with high-vacuum systems and with various machining tools used for constructing specialized optical test systems.
Dr. Vega has also interned at Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he worked on a wide range of projects. While at JPL, he became experienced in the fabrication of GaAs Schottky diodes and HEMTs; he applied his developing expertise in optic and DSP technology to the development of a free-space optical communications system; and he became experienced at RF communications simulation by modeling deep space signal timing recovery in low signal to noise conditions. Dr. Vega also gained RF test and measurement expertise by characterizing cryogenically cooled low-noise amplifiers.
Albert received his Ph.D. and Master’s in the area of electrical engineering from Purdue University in 2010 and 2002 respectively. He also received his Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2000.