Rate My Professor Nirmala Kandadai

Nirmala Kandadai is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, where she joined in 2022 and serves as director of the Fiber Optics Laser and Integrated Research Lab. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2012, with research on the interaction of high-intensity lasers with molecular gas clusters, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the same university in 2008, and a B.E. in Electronics and Computer Engineering from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, in 2004. Prior to Oregon State, she worked as a laser scientist at National Energetics, leading a team that designed and built high-power ultrafast laser systems, including the front end of a 10 PW laser for the European Union’s Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines facility. She held positions as research assistant professor in Boise in 2016 and tenure-track assistant professor since 2019.

Kandadai founded the IEEE Women in Engineering Boise section in 2020 and chaired it from 2020 to 2022. She received the 2022 Idaho Accomplished Under 40 award for promoting young girls and women in STEM and holds IEEE senior member status. Her research focuses on laser-matter interactions, sensors for extreme environments, infrared thermography, thermal conductivity, laser sintering, and plasma modeling, and she is part of the Electronic Materials and Devices group. Notable publications include "Explosions of Xenon Clusters in Ultraintense Femtosecond X-Ray Pulses from the LCLS Free Electron Laser" (Physical Review Letters, 2012), "DNA-templated aggregates of strongly coupled cyanine dyes: nonradiative decay governs exciton lifetimes" (The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2019), "Numerical analysis of radiation effects on fiber optic sensors" (Sensors, 2021), and "Plasma jet printing: an introduction" (IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 2023).