Shawn Agarwal

Electrical engineering senior at the University of Oklahoma

I grow epitaxial oxide and nitride thin films, measure them with high-resolution XRD, transport, and optical methods, and write the analysis software that turns that data into film-quality numbers.

See the research XRDC Email
Reciprocal-space map measured on a BaTiO3/SrTiO3/Si heterostructure
Reciprocal-space map of BaTiO3/SrTiO3/Si

Senior 4.00 / 4.00 GPA 122 credit hours Graduating May 2027 Yukon, OK

Research

Center for Quantum Research & Technology

Undergraduate researcher and Engineering Pathways Fellow in Dr. Hanjong Paik’s group. Epitaxial oxide and nitride films.

Building

Heading Software

Founded January 2026. AI document intelligence for oil and gas land services.

Most recently

Amazon OKC1

Operations intern in a robotics-driven fulfillment center, summer 2026.

Research

Since January 2026 I’ve worked in Dr. Hanjong Paik’s group at OU’s Center for Quantum Research & Technology. I grow epitaxial oxide and nitride thin films and heterostructures, and I run the deposition and measurement hardware.

My main project is BaTiO3/SrTiO3/Si. I run high-resolution XRD on the films and compare it against transport and optical measurements from the same samples. That gives crystalline quality, strain state, and a read on the interface, and it means a claim about film quality has more than one measurement behind it.

Analysis was the slow part. The group fit peaks by hand, so getting numbers out of a scan was slow and two people could get different answers from the same data. I wrote XRDC, a MATLAB toolkit for rocking curves and reciprocal-space maps, so that step happens the same way every time.

What I run

Growth Vacuum deposition of epitaxial oxide and nitride films and heterostructures
Structure High-resolution XRD: rocking curves, reciprocal-space maps, θ–2θ, reflectivity
Transport Electrical transport measurement on finished heterostructures
Optical Optical characterization, cross-checked against the diffraction result
Schematic of a BaTiO3 film on an SrTiO3 template layer on a silicon (001) substrate

BaTiO3/SrTiO3/Si heterostructures

Perovskite oxide on silicon. HRXRD, transport, and optical measurements on the same samples to judge crystal quality, strain, and the interface.

Vacuum deposition · HRXRD · Transport · Optical

Read more
Reciprocal-space map of a KTaO3 film on SrTiO3, plotted with XRDC from public PARADIM data

XRDC: X-ray diffraction analysis

MATLAB toolkit for rocking curves, reciprocal-space maps, XRR fitting, and lattice parameters. Ships as a tagged release so lab members can use the same version.

MATLAB · 6 file formats · v1.1.0 release
Example RSM from public PARADIM data

Read more

Projects

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition

Electrical Member · Sooner Competitive Robotics · Aug 2025 – May 2026

Custom PCBs for power regulation, signal conditioning, and hardware safety interlocks. I took each one from schematic through layout, assembly, and vehicle-level testing. Real-time control firmware on STM32 under an RTOS, and a shared CAN backbone linking the vehicle’s sensor controllers and safety-status signals.

Altium · STM32 / ARM Cortex-M · RTOS · CAN · C/C++

Details →

OpenCAN

CAN-to-USB bridge · IGVC

Small STM32 board that bridges the vehicle’s CAN bus to the onboard PC, so you can watch traffic live and reproduce a fault instead of guessing. The case study has an interactive 3D view of the board.

STM32 · CAN · USB · Altium

Details →

Heading Software

Founder & Engineer · Jan 2026 – present

AI document extraction for oil and gas land services. I built the LLM pipeline end to end (OCR, schema validation, citation grounding) plus an offline eval harness that tracks per-field precision and recall against a hand-labeled test set.

LLM pipelines · OCR · BullMQ / Redis · Evaluation harness

Details →

Student Tele-Operated Robotics Mission

Electrical Team Lead · 2024 – 2025

Led the electrical team through design reviews and testing. Multi-voltage power rails and buck converters at under 5% ripple, plus IR and RF signal decoding for the robot’s sensors.

Power electronics · Buck converters · IR / RF decoding · PCB design

Details →

Relevance classification at scale

Undergraduate researcher · DISC, OU · Sep 2024 – May 2025

Fine-tuned BERT for relevance classification over 1.6 million records. Used active-learning uncertainty sampling to pick what got labeled next, since the labeling budget was a few people’s time.

PyTorch · BERT · Active learning · Python

Details →

Other projects

ESP32Pet

ESP32 / KiCad

Handheld virtual pet on a custom PCB with an ST7735 LCD and state saved to EEPROM.

Infrared sensor board

RP2040 / IR

TSOP receivers decoded on a Pico and streamed to the robot’s main PC.

5 V buck converter

Power

Step-down board for the STORM power system.

STORM control board

Mixed signal

Main interface board tying the robot’s subsystem I/O to its microcontroller.

Low-cost security camera

ESP32-CAM

Wi-Fi streaming, motion detection, and remote viewing on AI-Thinker hardware.

ESP32 Wi-Fi upload to screen

ESP32 / HTTP

Web server on the ESP32 that takes a JPG upload and draws it on an ST7735.

KiCad ST7735S library

CAD

Symbol and footprint for a 1.8″ TFT so I stop redrawing it every project.

Sign-Language-AI

YOLOv8 / OpenCV

Gesture recognition with training, inference, and a desktop upload tool.

Gold.fish

React / Node

Spending tracker where your budget is the health of a fish tank.

Maze generator & solver

Python

Generates mazes and animates how different search strategies solve them.

Diet tracker

Python / SQLAlchemy

Offline meal and workout logging with plots over the logged history.

Experience

Jan 2026 – present

Undergraduate Researcher & Engineering Pathways Fellow

Center for Quantum Research & Technology, University of Oklahoma

  • Grow and characterize epitaxial oxide and nitride films and heterostructures in Dr. Hanjong Paik’s group. Run the deposition and measurement hardware.
  • Compare high-resolution XRD with transport and optical measurements on BaTiO3/SrTiO3/Si to get crystalline quality, strain state, and interface behavior.
  • Wrote XRDC, the MATLAB tool that replaced the group’s manual peak fitting and standardized how we report film-quality numbers.

Jan 2026 – present

Founder & Engineer

Heading Software, AI document intelligence for oil and gas land services

  • Built the LLM document-extraction and verification pipeline end to end: OCR, schema validation, and citation grounding.
  • Wrote an offline evaluation harness tracking per-field precision and recall against a hand-labeled test set.
  • Built a BullMQ/Redis batch layer with idempotent workers and automated QA that catches drift, duplicates, and corrupt inputs.

May – Aug 2026

Operations Intern

Amazon OKC1 Fulfillment Center, robotics-driven fulfillment

  • Analyzed process and flow data to find throughput bottlenecks, then modeled a change projected to save about $800K a year at the site.
  • Ran a 280-associate floor with technicians, engineers, and area managers, holding safety, quality, and readiness standards against daily production targets.

Aug 2025 – May 2026

Electrical Member, Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition

Sooner Competitive Robotics, University of Oklahoma

  • Designed and brought up custom PCBs for power regulation, signal conditioning, and hardware safety interlocks, from schematic through layout, assembly, and system-level verification.
  • Wrote real-time control firmware in C/C++ on STM32 (ARM Cortex-M) under an RTOS with prioritized task scheduling.
  • Connected the vehicle’s sensor controllers and safety-status signals through a shared CAN backbone, including interfaces for GPS, IMU, encoders, LiDAR, and camera subsystems. Built a CAN-to-USB bridge to log CAN traffic and reproduce intermittent communication faults.
  • Wrote and ran bench and vehicle-level test procedures. Isolated hardware and firmware faults with a scope and logic probing and closed them out before build deadlines.

Aug 2025 – present

Tutor

OU Math Center

  • Help students through problems across the engineering math sequence.

Sep 2024 – May 2025

Undergraduate Researcher

Data Institute for Societal Challenges, University of Oklahoma

  • Fine-tuned BERT for relevance classification over 1.6 million records, using active-learning uncertainty sampling to choose what to label next.

Aug 2024 – May 2025

Electrical Team Lead, Student Tele-Operated Robotics Mission

Sooner Competitive Robotics, University of Oklahoma

  • Designed multi-voltage power rails and buck converters, bringing output ripple under 5%.
  • Implemented IR and RF signal decoding for the robot’s sensing path.
  • Led the electrical team through design reviews and test phases.

Aug 2023 – May 2024

Team Lead, VEX Robotics

Canadian Valley Technology Center

  • Qualified for and competed at the VEX World Championship.

Skills

Materials & measurement
Vacuum deposition, epitaxial thin-film growth, high-resolution XRD (rocking curves, reciprocal-space mapping), transport measurement, optical characterization
Electronics & hardware
Altium (schematic + PCB layout), power electronics, buck converters, signal conditioning, soldering and rework, Fusion 360
Embedded
STM32 / ARM Cortex-M, RTOS, CAN / FDCAN, SPI, I2C, UART
Test & instrumentation
Oscilloscope and DMM bring-up and debug, logic-level probing, test procedure development, fault isolation
Programming
C/C++, Python, MATLAB, Rust, SQL
Tools
PyTorch, TensorFlow, Git, LaTeX, Redis / BullMQ

Education

B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Oklahoma

Started August 2024, graduating May 2027. Three-year degree, 122 credit hours completed. Honors College coursework.

4.00Cumulative GPA

Quantum & solid state
Modern Physics for Engineers, Electron Transport Phenomena Fall 2026 Intro to Solid-State Electronic Devices Spring 2027 Quantum Mechanics I (PHYS 3803), Quantum Structures & Devices (ECE 5343, graduate level)
Fields & waves
Electromagnetic Fields I Fall 2026 EM Fields & Wave Propagation (graduate level, one of two undergraduates in the class)
Circuits & electronics
Circuits I–II, Introductory Electronics, Energy Conversion I, circuits and electronics laboratories Fall 2026 PCB Design Principles
Digital & embedded
Digital Design, Microprocessor System Design Fall 2026 Digital Design Laboratory
Signals & mathematics
Signals & Systems, Digital Signals & Filtering, Linear Algebra, Probability / Statistics / Random Processes, Calculus I–III, Differential Equations Spring 2027 Senior capstone

Awards

  • Oklahoma Regents Scholar, 2024 to present
  • President’s List and Dean’s List, every eligible semester
  • Distinguished Freshman Award, 2025
  • Engineering Pathways Fellowship, CQRT, 2026
  • Nominee, OU Outstanding Senior Award, 2026

Involvement

  • IEEE
  • Engineers’ Club
  • Sooner Competitive Robotics
  • Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers
  • Gamma Beta, Service Chair

Contact

Open to graduate research and engineering roles.

University shawn.a.agarwal-1@ou.edu Personal shawnagarwal0@gmail.com GitHub github.com/dishishshawn LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/shawnagarwal Résumé Open PDF
Based in Yukon, Oklahoma