Yifan Sun AT&T Labs Fellowship Award Winner  by: Staff, August
3, 2010      Asking Yifan Sun about her summer project is to be
dropped willy-nilly and without preamble into a detailed
discussion about phases and frequencies of light pulses, sine
and cosine waves, and the interaction of light waves with
fiber—subjects most people encounter only in science class. But
Yifan is an electrical engineer, and the properties of light and
waves are part and parcel of her summer project within the
Optical Systems Research Department at AT&T.  From high school
(a math and science magnet school in Illinois), she identified
electrical engineering as a possible career choice. Of all the
avenues open to someone mathematically inclined and with her
wide-ranging interests (including carpentry) and extra-
curricular activities, electrical engineering appealed to her
for its mix of mathematics and programming, predictive modeling,
and the hands-on nature of the work.  (If you’re wondering about
the connection between fiber optics