Nanotechnology Fellows Program: Preparing Undergraduate Students for Careers in Nanotechnology

Dr. Saniya LeBlanc obtained a PhD in mechanical engineering with a minor in materials science at Stanford University. She earned her BS with highest honors from Georgia Institute of Technology and a Master’s of Philosophy in Engineering from Cambridge University as a Churchill Scholar. Dr. LeBlanc has received fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Sandia National Labs, and Stanford’s Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence program. With a strong commitment to educational equity, she served in Teach For America as a high school math and physics teacher in Washington, D.C., and she was co-founder of the American Society for Engineering Education’s Stanford chapter. Dr. LeBlanc joined GWU from Alphabet Energy, a San Francisco Bay Area startup company, where she created research, development, and manufacturing characterization solutions for thermoelectric technologies and evaluated the potential of new power generation materials. Dr. LeBlanc’s research goals are to utilize nanoand micro-structuring techniques to improve energy systems. She uses scalable manufacturing techniques to create nanostructured materials for energy and thermal management applications and creates techno-economic models for emerging energy technologies.