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Sequoia Ploeg

Sequoia Ploeg

Research Assistant
Ph.D. Candidate

400 Clyde Building

About

Sequoia Ploeg is a Ph.D. student in BYU's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He majored in Electrical Engineering, completing minors in Mathematics and Computer Science in April 2020. He joined CamachoLab in October, 2017.

Born in the US but raised in Australia, Sequoia's interests include aviation, air & space systems, and autonomous vehicles (both land vehicles and aircraft). His undergraduate education includes an emphasis in controls and signals and systems, and he is working on the AUVSI Student Unmanned Aerial Systems competition team at BYU for his senior Capstone project.

Sequoia Ploeg currently serves as the President of the BYU Zeta Eta chapter of IEEE's honor society, Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN), and is a student member of IEEE. In addition to his academic interests, he sings with the BYU Men's Chorus, enjoys playing the piano, and spending time hiking and camping in the mountains of Utah.

Research

Sequoia has worked on many of the research projects within CamachoLab. His most recent research mainly supports the Quantum Communications research project.

Simphony: A Simulator for Photonic Integrated Circuits

Sequoia, working with Hyrum Gunther, developed an open-source Python package for efficiently simulating photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Development began during the summer of 2018, and the project is actively maintained on GitHub.

The project arose out of a need for a cross-platform, interoperable, non-proprietary solution for the design and simulation of PICs. While several commercial tools exist, they are highly proprietary and don't work well with other software solutions, rendering them highly inflexible. Simphony solves that issue in several ways. Being implemented in Python, it works well with many other languages and softwares. Being free and open source allows for widespread adoption by the design community, as well as the easy implementation of new photonic component models by end users, extending its capabilities even further.

Quantum Key Distribution

A project in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Green Machine

A project in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories. Learn more here.