Ryan Ng

Ryan Ng is a Mechanical Engineering student at the City College of New York where he will be entering his junior year.

Ng grew up in New Hyde Park in Long Island, New York and attended New Hyde Park Memorial High School. It was there, after taking AP Chemistry, that he decided to pursue engineering. “The course helped me to follow a more academic path,” he says.

This summer, Ng worked under Professor Sander on the project “Patterning Graphene with an Ultrafast Laser” which aims to modify structures at the atomic level layer scale with an ultrafast laser system. “I like to describe my project as printing using a laser,” he says. 

“Working at such a small scale,” he says, “there were so many challenges we faced getting results initially.” He describes the difficulty of aligning the laser and the sample so the etching would be clear and the trial and error he and his group went through before achieving consistently reproducible results. Once he had the basics figured out, Ng was able to program a microcontroller to create more complicated designs.

When not working, Ng enjoys spending time with his fellow REU participants. “I think the best part of this experience has been living together in the same building with the rest of the REU participants,” he says. “They’re all nice people and come from really diverse backgrounds. It really helped all of us to get to know one another.”

Ng enjoyed the freedom of working on a goal-oriented research project. “I wasn’t just performing experiments and seeing what was happening, I had something I actually wanted to accomplish and that really forced me to think, ‘How can I do this?’” he says. “It was like a different way of thinking, and really using all the knowledge that I’ve learned through my college career into this project.”