PhD Student Who Dreamed Of Being An Inventor And Builder Is Now Making Strides In World Of Quantum Photonics

Achievements, honors for electrical engineer Samuel Peana now will include a 3-year Truman Fellowship at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico

Growing up, Samuel Peana loved to build things. The world was his playground for tinkering and taking apart common things and discovering how they work — especially the inner workings of computers and potential interconnections between computers and robots, an interest sparked by his father, who was an engineer for Motorola.

“As long as I can remember, I think the job description I wanted was as an inventor. I wanted to design and build things that nobody had done before,” Peana says.

Peana (pronounced Payn-yuh) graduated this spring with his PhD in electrical engineering from Purdue University. Commencement ceremonies in May culminated Peana’s nine-year academic journey studying how to create optically driven microrobotic actuators based on shape memory alloy thin films integrated with plasmonics while also researching the challenging field of integrated quantum photonics.

For his doctoral dissertation, Peana was part of a Purdue team including Zachariah Martin and Alexander Senichev that discovered a type of single photon emitter that occurs at the interface of silicon nitride and silicon dioxide after being rapidly heated. The research has applications and major implications for quantum mechanics.

Decorated with several scholarships, fellowships and awards during his young career, Peana also won a College of Engineering 2024 Outstanding Research Award, which recognizes graduate students who have demonstrated excellence and leadership in research through publications, participation in professional organizations and a willingness to mentor others. And the honors keep coming: This spring, he was awarded a three-year Truman Fellowship from Sandia National Laboratories to continue his research and postdoctoral studies, beginning this October, at the U.S. Department of Energy facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“Building on my terrific experience at Purdue, I’m excited about the opportunity to continue my research as a Truman Fellow at Sandia, which has one of the nation’s best research foundries,” says Peana, who looks forward to a career in deep tech research in either academia or industry.