Teaching Undergraduate Students Integrated Photonics and Fabrication Through Research

An innovative undergraduate level Nanofabrication course with a focus on photonics is proposed. This course challenges the definition of what constitutes an undergraduate class in a research-intensive university. Namely, instructor and teaching assistants (TAs) propose a moderately challenging graduate-level research project that has not been previously published; challenge the Team, consisting of the students, with the TAs and instructor, to research during the class, as a Team; have the Team collaborate on writing a research paper with the goal of submitting it to an archival journal. Through this process, students learn the course content and experience how research is conducted.