Meet Dr. Sharma, Expert in Electrical Engineering Professor Joins Ritchie School

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Hello, everyone, I am Prachi Sharma. I am a teaching assistant professor with the Department of Electrical [& Computer] Engineering. So before joining the University of Denver, I worked as an adjunct faculty and postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder.

My research there was on perovskite materials for solar cells. I have worked in the industry before, at Intel as both a process engineer in the fab and a design engineer on the graphics processing unit. So my interests are broadly semiconductor devices, real asset design, digital design.

So yeah, I realised that I always, I have this passion for teaching during my PhD. I got lots of opportunities to interact with students, as an instructor during that time, and I also got opportunities to interact with high school students with outreach activities, and all these activities where I was interacting with students. Basically teaching activities where I was an instructor and talking to them about my field, or my research, or even just electrical engineering in general, made me feel really happy. It was the thing that I enjoyed, really, really enjoy. I look forward to it, every time I had this opportunity, my life goal is to be in teaching basically, that gives me real joy. And I wanted to be a part of one of the premium institutes and since we are settled here and DU is one of the premium institutes in the greater Denver area. So I was very excited when I got this opportunity to actually join DU and be a teaching faculty here.

So there are basically two ways of always going through a course. One way is you do the homeworks, you do the exam, and you will probably get a good grade. Definitely if you've put in the work, you will get a good grade. But there's another way where you question the why of everything as to why we are doing this particular example in this particular way, or solving this problem in this particular way. And is there a better way? So there's definitely those two distinctions. So asking those kind of questions is what is important when you take higher level courses, if you go into research, then that's definitely really, really important. And even in industry, where there is definitely no hand holding, there is no homeworks, no installation guides, you're pretty much required to take ownership of the project that you're working on. So asking those kind of questions as to why we are doing this and is there a better way to do this is something that I wish that I can, you know, enable my students to think in that way and inculcate that thinking process in my students.