My name is Dr. Parthiban Santhanam, though I typically go by Parthi. I am currently working as a postdoc in Prof. Shanhui Fan's research group at Stanford. My work is primarily geared toward the experimental demonstration of LED refrigeration at practical power density. My broader focus is on thermally- and electrically-driven semiconductor diodes for energy conversion and information transmission applications.

A rapidly increasing fraction of both global electrical power generation and global electrical demand passes through a semiconductor p-n junction; My interests inside and outside of the laboratory lay in contributing to this evolution in various ways.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Scholar within the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford University. Though I try to update this domain at least once a year, to see what I've been working on more recently, I recommend checking my Google Scholar page.


From September 2015 to March 2016, I was working at a startup company, Exergy Dynamics, Inc., to commercialize efficient LED technologies including phonon recycling (patent issued Jan. 31, 2017; Current Assignee: Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

News & Updates.

Note: For more frequent updates please see my Google Scholar page.

16 September 2015: I have moved to a single-founder startup, Exergy Dynamics, Inc.

1 April 2014: I have moved to a new lab at Stanford University.

3 November 2013: Applied Physics Letters has published our recent result of the first demonstration of an LED operating above unity wall-plug efficiency at room temperature.

17 September 2013: Applied Physics Letters has published our recent design results for a λ=2.15μm LED which exploits thermo-electric pumping to achieve a 20x improvement in efficiency at micro-watt power levels.



contact (omit ellipsis): santhanam_dot_part...hiban_at_gmail_dot_com