What are your career choices after graduate school? Will you develop technology yourself? Will you work in a team? Will you guide people? Where will you work: in industry, research lab, or academia? Regardless where you work, there is generally one item that you are not being taught in graduate school: your communication skills. Come and hear my personal perspective on working in Industry (Texas Instruments) for 4 years, in a U.S. government research laboratory (NASA JPL) for 6 years and in an academic institution (Purdue University) for over 5 years. Within the presentation I will highlight my “recipe” for a strategically structured presentation that is open and inviting to any audience. The key message is that about 1/3 of the presentation should introduce the overall topic and relevance of the problems to be solved. The next 1/3 of the presentation should highlight the beautiful solutions that have been achieved without any technical details. These 2/3 of the presentation should be accessible to all members of the audience. The next 1/6 of the presentation addresses details of the work that are understandable to experts in the audience, the last 1/6 gathers the whole audience and provides a perspective of what needs to be done with the topic in the future.

Gerhard Klimeck is the Reilly Director of the Center for Predictive Materials and Devices (c-PRIMED) and the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.

He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP),a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), a Fellow of IEEE and member of HKN and TBP.

He guides the technical developments and strategies of nanoHUB.org which annually serves over 320,000 users worldwide with on-line simulation, tutorials, and seminars.

Prof. Klimeck’s research interest is the modeling of nanoelectronic devices, bridging the gap between material science and device engineering, and impact studies through science gateways. He drives the development of the Nanoelectronic Modeling Tool NEMO5.

Dr. Klimeck was the Technical Group Supervisor of the High Performance Computing Group and a Principal Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Previously he was a member of technical staff at the Central Research Lab of Texas Instruments where he served as manager and principal architect of the Nanoelectronic Modeling (NEMO 1-D) program. At JPL and Purdue Gerhard developed the Nanoelectronic Modeling tool (NEMO 3-D ) for multimillion atom simulations.

Dr. Klimeck received his Ph.D. in 1994 on Quantum Transport from Purdue University and his German electrical engineering degree in experimental studies of laser noise propagation in 1990 from Ruhr-University Bochum.

NEMO 1-D was the first quantitative simulation tool for resonant tunneling diodes and 1D heterostructures. NEMO 3-D was the first multi-million atom electronic structure code and has been used to quantitatively model optical properties of self-assembled quantum dots, disordered Si/SiGe systems, and single impurities in Silicon. The NEMO are based on the representation of the nanoelectronic device with atomistic empirical tight-binding. Quantitative device modeling was demonstrated without any material parameter adjustments, just by entry of geometrical structure parameters. At Purdue his group is developing a new simulation engines that combine the NEMO 1-D and NEMO 3-D capabilities into new codes entitled OMEN and NEMO5.

Dr. Klimeck’s work is documented in over 240 peer-reviewed journal and 190 proceedings publications and over 230 invited and 450 contributed conference presentations. His h-index is 41 on the Web of Science and 51 on Google Scholar.

NEMO 1-D was recently demonstrated to scale to 23,000 parallel processors, NEMO 3-D was demonstrated to scale to 8,192 processors, and OMEN was demonstrated to scale to 222.720 processors. More information about NEMO 1-D, NEMO 3-D, OMEN, and NEMO5 can be found at their respective home pages.

Prof. Klimeck uses Linked-In to network professionally and Facebook to network with friends.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Gerhard Klimeck (2016), "Your Career Choices after Graduate School and The Most-Neglected Item in your Career Development (2016)," https://nanohub.org/resources/24947.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. career development
2. professional development