Pran Mukherjee is a Research Scientist in the Space Nanotechnology Laboratory (SNL) at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His expertise in silicon nanofabrication combined with advanced knowledge of space instrumentation enabled him to become the first researcher at the University of Michigan to merge the two disciplines to build space-based sensor components. His primary research interests are silicon process engineering, plasma etch technology, sensors, and alternative energy.

Dr. Mukherjee received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1996. He spent the next seven years working on large-scale software engineering projects including a battlefield-scale target designator using synthetic aperture radar, vehicle passenger detection for airbag deployment, an immersive 3D jetski simulator for the Coast Guard, and others. In 2004 he was the first student to graduate from the University of Michigan's new Master's of Engineering program in Integrated Microsystems. He went on to complete his M.S. ('05) and Ph.D. ('08) in Space and Atmospheric Science under Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen in the Solar-Heliospheric Research Group. He won two prestigious NASA Graduate Student Research Program grants as primary funding for the work, as well as an ancillary grant for laboratory funding.

His Ph.D. dissertation included the modeling of inner heliospheric pickup ion populations and examination of instrumentation necessary to measure them. Extremely efficient and mechanically robust filters are required to block the abundant vacuum ultraviolet light while allowing atoms and molecules through for measurement. Dr. Mukherjee designed, fabricated, and tested freestanding ultra-high aspect ratio silicon nanogratings as the first step toward such a filter. A subsequent NASA grant based on his research currently enables the continuation of the project by other students with the intent of flying the gratings on the Solar Probe Plus mission in 2015.

Dr. Mukherjee's current research at MIT is an extension and amplification of his graduate work. He has achieved record-breaking geometries for his silicon nanogratings, nearly tripling the results obtained during his PhD research. These new gratings will be the key element of the Critical-Angle Transmission Grating Spectrometer, an X-ray diffraction instrument on the International X-ray Observatory. In addition, he designed a process for an industrial study of quantum-dot enhanced solar cells on glass, created a technique to enable efficient cooling during the etching of thin membrane silicon devices, and has shouldered some of the duties of lab management for the SNL. He is also assisting in the guidance of graduate students both at MIT and at the University of Michigan.