Rate My Professor Tania Roy

Tania Roy is a distinguished Engineering faculty member at the University of Central Florida (UCF), serving as Assistant Professor with joint appointments in the NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering since July 2016. She maintains a Courtesy Assistant Professor position in the Department of Physics. Roy earned her B.E. (Hons.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani, India, in 2006, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University in December 2011, where her dissertation examined the reliability of GaN/AlGaN high electron mobility transistors for high power and high frequency electronics. Prior to UCF, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology, focusing on graphene-based devices for low power applications until 2013, followed by a postdoctoral position at University of California, Berkeley from 2014 to 2016. There, she developed the world’s first all-two-dimensional transistor and the first gate-controlled Esaki diode using van der Waals heterojunctions.

Roy's research specializations encompass semiconductor device physics, solid-state physics, next-generation electronics, two-dimensional materials, solar cells, neuromorphic computing, and energy-efficient electronics and optoelectronics using novel functional materials. At UCF, her group pioneered brain-like devices for artificial intelligence, including memristive synapses with ultra-low variability using MoS2, ultrasensitive and ultrathin phototransistors and photonic synapses with perovskite quantum dots grown from graphene lattices, and artificial neurons via vertical MoS2/graphene threshold switching memristors. Key publications include "Field-effect transistors built from all two-dimensional material components" (ACS Nano, 2014), "Dual-Gated MoS2/WSe2 van der Waals Tunnel Diodes and Transistors" (ACS Nano, 2015), "The Role of Graphene and Other 2D Materials in Solar Photovoltaics" (Advanced Materials, 2019), "Artificial Neuron using Vertical MoS2/Graphene Threshold Switching Memristors" (Scientific Reports, 2019), and "Ultrasensitive and ultrathin phototransistors and photonic synapses using perovskite quantum dots grown from graphene lattice" (Science Advances, 2020). She has earned major awards such as the NSF CAREER Award in 2019 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2025. Her work has advanced radiation-resilient electronics and in-memory computing for space and remote applications.