Brooke McGoldrick

Brooke McGoldrick is a PhD candidate working at the frontier of neuromorphic computing, an emergent field that seeks to build new computing architectures that offer major advantages over traditional, electronic hardware. Specifically, Brooke is studying devices called magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), with the goal of demonstrating that MTJ-based nano-oscillators are good candidates for building a computing architecture called an Ising machine, which is created to solve combinatorial optimization problems that remain unsolvable on traditional electronic computers. Brooke has already established a solid foundation for understanding these systems and has demonstrated that they can be orders of magnitude faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient than previous architectures. Her MathWorks Fellowship will allow her to expand this successful work, using her novel compact model of an MTJ in circuit-level simulations and fabricating MTJs in order to physically realize the Ising machine. MATLAB powers Brooke’s innovative work from theory and simulation to experimentation and fabrication. Her open-source tools will be of great utility to other researchers, and her research holds the potential to revolutionize neuromorphic computing.