Siddiqui earns Early Career Award with can-do attitude

URBANA — Saima Siddiqui is the recipient of the 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Chicago Early Career Award in Magnetics.

“(It’s) really amazing,” said Siddiqui, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who has a passion for building energy-efficient magnetic materials.

Her biggest challenge as of late is computation in sensors.

“We have all (of) these sensors around, right? In our home, say Alexa and Google, right?” Siddiqui said. “So what it does is as a sensor it takes the data, and it sends everything to the cloud. The cloud (then) does all the computing, and then (it) comes back to the device and does all of the parameter changes and everything.”

All that communication requires a ton of energy. The question becomes: what if the device can’t access an energy source all the time? Think about pacemakers or an electric car.

“The challenge (is) we cannot build the whole computation part in these sensors,” Siddiqui said. “That’s too expensive energetically and also, in terms of security, it’s also easy to hack your data in that way.”

But if sensors could do the computation and encoding, there is little room for security concerns.

“There will be some other challenges, definitely,” Siddiqui added, “but it will be safer.”

Siddiqui hopes to do just that alongside her advisor Axel Hoffmann, Founder Professor in Engineering at the U of I’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who nominated her for the award.

She and Hoffmann began working together during her nine-month stent as a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne National Laboratory’s Materials Science division, where she shifted her entire research focus from semiconductor devices to materials science.

“I (got) interested in working with him while I was in grad school. I was following his work really closely,” said Siddiqui, who received master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from MIT and a bachelor’s from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Dhaka, Bangladesh). “I joined (his team) and then moved with him. He was in transition and said, ‘I will be going to the U of I within a year. Are you OK with that?’ I was like, ‘I’m definitely coming with you!’”

Her passion and commitment have already paid off tenfold. Siddiqui isn’t stopping here, though. She aspires to be involved in academia or industry pursuing a career in materials science.

“I really enjoy doing research,” she said. “I think physics is the most interesting thing to me, finding out all those rules and everything, and how (the) very simple rules apply to your real life.”

Her advice for up-and-coming postdocs?

“Be open to any opportunity,” Siddiqui said. “Don’t be afraid of anything because something will work out.”

Siddiqui serves as an inspirational example, having “come from a place where doing experimental research is not very easy,” she said.

“And also, moving from there to here is also not impossible, but it’s a challenge,” she added. “I believe (that) when people see that someone from very little knowledge from the (field) can come forward and do these cool experimental things, then people should be excited.”

“Anyone can do it,” Siddiqui said, “You just need to be interested.”