Tarun Narayan

About Tarun Narayan

I\'m passionate about clean energy and sustainability issues and have dedicated my career to solving various challenges in this field. I have a materials science PhD with expertise in a broad range of fields including materials characterization, data analysis, physics modeling, and electrical design.

Experience

1. Principal Engineer

   Antora Energy

   Apr 2018 — Present · Sunnyvale, CA, US

   Proposed, designed, built, maintained, and improved primary modeling tool for photovoltaic cell R&D used to identify more efficient architectures such as those resulting in world record thermophotovoltaic efficiency.• Proposed a tool to automatically evaluate cell efficiency from data and managed two interns to build and maintain it, enabling evaluation of yields of production cells and reporting to funding agencies.• Evaluated various reflectance measurement methods, chose the most relevant technique, built up experimental expertise, wrote data processing scripts, and trained new super users. Technique is now one of the three measurements carried out by the company on every wafer to guide cell R&D and production.• Led evaluation of one of two architectures for pilot system. Built a simulation from first principles, managed consultant to perform in-depth calculations, designed and built experiment to corroborate theory, identified key flaws of the architecture to management, and recommended an alternate approach.• Managed a consultant to improve financial model of projects delivering heat and/or electricity in regions of different solar and wind resource profiles.• Designed electrical architecture to safely deliver low voltage power to our energy storage system from a medium voltage source.• Led data analysis for test rigs to quantify phenomena like heat loss and and heater lifetime.• Built Jupyter notebooks to enable easier data analysis by engineers.• Helped run intern program by designing interview processes, writing job descriptions, offering career advice for interns, and mentoring 9 interns.• Significantly ramped up company presence at career fairs to create a more diverse pipeline of candidates

Education

• Harvey Mudd College

  B.S., Chemistry

  2006 — 2010

• Stanford University

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Materials Science and Engineering

  2012 — 2016

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Master of Science - MS, Inorganic Chemistry

Skills

• Science
• Electrochemistry
• Research
• Organic Synthesis
• Spectroscopy
• Microsoft Excel
• Nanoparticles
• Tem
• Nanotechnology
• Cleanroom Fabrication
• Transmission Electron Microscopy
• Matlab
• Nanoparticle Synthesis
• Teamwork
• Organic Chemistry
• Data Analysis
• Chemistry
• Thermodynamics
• Latex
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Science
• Technical Data Analysis
• Microsoft Office
• Phase Transformations
• Catalysis
• Microscopy
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Powerpoint