The American bug bit him around 1993 when he saw his older friends doing interesting research abroad. A successful final year project in robotics and vision systems and an excellent GPA set the path to Cornell University in 1995. Working in materials processing for a year, he found out about this new field called Micro ElectroMechanical Systems in a Scientific American article during the fall of 1995. The subject immediately captured his interest and his die hard efforts got him into Prof. Noel C. MacDonald’s research group in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He changed his major in 1996 to ECE and formally joined the MEMS group. The years at Cornell helped shape him into a confident and outgoing person. He discovered several of his current interests, including travel, cooking, music and philosophy, during these years. He followed his advisor to UC Santa Barbara in 2000 when research was picking up plenty of steam. His wedding to Vidya in August 2001 was a blessing as he had found the most beautiful, talented and encouraging wife. Several trips to Ithaca and Stanford, a few patents and a lot of late nights and weekends later, he finally decided to defend his thesis and enter the real world.