A University of Alabama student and faculty member won two awards at a prestious conference for people in the microelectronics and packaging society earlier this month.

The International Microelectronics and Packaging Society is the largest society dedicated to the advancement and growth of microelectronics and electronics packaging technologies through professional education. They held their annual international symposium in San Diego earlier in the month.

Anurag Gupta, a third year Ph.D. student with a major in materials science in the department of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded the prestigious Steve Adamson Memorial Award for leadership and contribution to chapter activities and extensive involvement and contributions to publications in technical fields of knowledge.

Gupta attended the conference with another UA Ph.D. student Kaushal Kannan and faculty advisor Bruce Kim.

Kim was presented with the Outstanding Educator Award for his mentorship and involvement with the student chapter activities as well as his extensive technical contributions in the field of packaging.

The group has currently have more than 4,000 members in the United States and another 4,000 international members, according to their website, imaps.org.

“[The Conference] had more than 100 companies with over 1,000 participants, both national and international from academia to industry,” Gupta said.

Gupta spoke at at the symposium and was provided complete travel support, a subsidized registration fee and free professional development courses.

“Companies such as IBM, Qualcomm and DuPont were in attendance,” Gupta said.

With so much success on an international level, the group is working towards building the UA IMAPS chapter in order to be an officially recognized student organization.

Gupta said the student chapter has been trying to expand student participation at the University through meetings and educating students about the benefits of joining. He claims that there are many positive results from joining inlcuding access to the IMAPS job portal. Students can gain valuable recognition by presenting their work at workshops and symposium while having the opportunities to win monetary prizes.

“To sum up, we have been trying to make The University of Alabama student chapter visible on the packaging industry map, so that the students can participate in and pursue packaging-related research and activities,” Gupta said.

Interested students are encouraged to email Gupta at [email protected].