Aakash Pushp

Welcome to my webpage! My name is Aakash. I am from a small town called Ranchi in India.

After finishing my high school from Delhi Public School, Ranchi (in 1999), I had a stint of four years (1999 - 2003) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay studying Engineering Physics. Once both IIT and I got sick of each other (just kidding!), I moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IL, USA (in 2003) and then to Princeton University (in 2005) for a PhD in Physics.

During my PhD (2003 - 2009) I worked with Prof. Ali Yazdani on building a sophisticated variable temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) to study high temperature (high-Tc) superconductors.

After finishing my PhD, I joined Dr. Stuart Parkin’s group at IBM Almaden Research Center as a Post Doc (in Jan 2010) working primarily on the novel field of Spin Caloritronics, which proposes to harness heat energy (usually considered a nuisance in the ever shrinking technological devices) in its functional form to create pure spin currents that could have a significant impact on spintronics. I am also working on several other projects related to Spintronics, High-Tc superconductivity, Metal to Insulator transition materials such as the Vanadates (VO2 and V2O3), Topological Insulators and using ideas from topology and topological defects to create and control the formation of domain walls and their dynamics in magnetic nanodots and networks of magnetic 'racetrack' nanowires.