From the Ballroom to the Bay Area

Carnegie Mellon University alumni Marc Fasnacht and Vidhya Ramachandran enrolled in similar classes during their doctoral programs in the Department of Physics. Where they got to know each other, though, was the dance floor. They each signed up for lessons from CMU's Ballroom Dancing Club.

"It was a great way to get to meet people and do something different," Ramachandran said. "We both had two left feet."

"We still argue over about who stepped on the other person's feet more," Fasnacht added.

After that, they spent study together and regular events for international students.

Fasnacht came to Pittsburgh through an exchange program at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and returned to CMU to pursue a Ph.D. in Physics. While earning his Ph.D. in Physics, he also earned he also earned a M.S. in knowledge discovery and data mining from the School of Computer Science.

With Robert Swendsen, emeritus professor of physics, he investigated computational condensed matter physics with a focus on biological and physical systems.

"I was working on some biological problems related to proteins, and I was doing computational simulations," Fasnacht said. "The interactive collaboration between departments was great. I was working with the Department of Physics and the University of Pittsburgh Biological Sciences department, so it was very interdisciplinary."

Ramachandran came to Carnegie Mellon after earning her master's in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. She worked with Randall Feenstra, emeritus professor of physics, as his first Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon.

As part of Feenstra's group, Ramachandran studied gallium nitride, which can be used as a semiconductor in blue LEDs and in high-speed transistors. Ramachandran used scanning tunnel microscopy, which images surfaces at the atomic level, to investigate its molecular makeup and its uses.

"Vidhya did excellent work in the lab, both with a stand-alone scanning tunnel microscope and on the combined molecular beam epitaxy scanning electron microscope we built up here," Feenstra said. "She was always quick to pick up new aspects of the work, and she had an excellent attitude towards the work in general."

After graduation, Fasnacht worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University using computational methods to investigate structure and function of biological macromolecules, and Ramachandran accepted a position at IBM developing new chips for wireless technology.

They also went from being dance partners to life partners, getting married in 2001.

In 2006, the pair moved to San Diego when Fasnacht earned a position as a software development scientists at Biovia, a company that focuses on creating scientific software. Ramachandran continued at IBM before moving to Qualcomm as a process integration engineer.

Fasnacht now works at Illumina helping to analyze and interpret genetic data, and Ramachandran works at Apple, designing chips and other technologies for MacBooks and iPhones. Both said their Ph.D.s at Carnegie Mellon helped them develop the skills and knowledge they needed to succeed in their respective work.

"When I was at CMU, I was also doing a lot of computational work," Fasnacht said. "That helped me prepare for software engineering."

"Physics is foundational," Ramachandran added. "Engineering is based off physics, and so it really gives you an insight into how things will behave and where things go. I have found that to be very, very valuable throughout my career."

The pair's stories about Carnegie Mellon helped inspire their daughter to apply. She is a first year in the College of Engineering. Fasnacht and Ramachandran both said that Carnegie Mellon is an ideal place for students, including their daughter, to grow.

"Carnegie Mellon is such a diverse community. To me, it's the ideal place where people can have hard and interesting conversations," Ramachandran said. "We're really glad our daughter is going here, too."

Though the pair haven't danced much since their time at Carnegie Mellon, they hope to get back into it.

"We're thinking about starting lessons again now we're empty nesters," Fasnacht said.