MIDE Spotlight: Sai Pinnepalli

Sai Siva Kumar Pinnepalli is a Ph.D. candidate at the UMKC Missouri Institute for Defense and Energy (MIDE). Sai’s research focuses on atomic structure characterization of complex disordered thin films fabricated by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition and to evaluate process-structure-property relations for long-term goals of optimizing simulations and training machine learning algorithms. Sai is recognized for his exemplary work ethic and contributions to MIDE. We asked Sai a few questions about his experience with MIDE since he joined our team in May 2019.

Question: What has been your proudest moment working with MIDE?

Sai: MIDE offers enormous freedom to conduct research and explore science. Having owned the responsibilities for my project, every single achievement towards project goals provided a sense of accomplishment. One of the proudest moments was securing neutron and synchrotron X-ray beamtimes at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, respectively, to conduct advanced structure characterization experiments of disordered solids. After submitting the proposals multiple times over a couple of years, we were finally allotted beamtime to obtain data for proof-of-concept purposes. It was also a great learning experience on how to write a competitive proposal.

Question: What drew you to work with MIDE?

Sai: I joined the UMKC interdisciplinary Ph.D. program as an international student, and I was doing lab rotations to choose my research area. At that point, MIDE offered me an exciting opportunity as a graduate research assistant to work on an NSF-funded project at the interface of chemistry and physics. The project was intriguing to carry out fundamental research that has significant implications for semiconductor applications. Since day one, it’s been a great learning environment, and I see myself evolving intellectually in the past three years. I am forever grateful to my advisors and MIDE for this unique opportunity.

Question: Name one unique thing about you most people don’t know.

I have an avid appetite for learning new languages, especially those spoken in the places I live. I can speak three Indian languages (Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi) apart from English. My current interest lies in learning Spanish Sai