Ricardo Braga Nogueira Branco was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1997. He received the B.S. with honors, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State University, University Park, in 2019, 2021, and 2024, respectively. From 2024 to present, he has been a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. 

His research interests include designing and developing advanced thermopile detectors for space applications, including but not limited to Earth observations, future Moon missions, and extremely cold bodies in space such as the outer planets of the Solar System. Thermopiles are uncooled detectors that can perform thermal imaging and spectroscopy, and have the siginifanct benefit of integrating into a small Cost, Size, Weight, and Power (C-SWaP) instruments. Ricardo has been working alogside his postdoc mentor, Dr. Matthew Kenyon, to develop and test a next-generation thermopile detector for space-based remote sening in the far-infrared. These JPL-made thermopiles have several advantadges over competing technologies, such as bolometers, and when compared to the flight state-of-the-art detector used in the PREFIRE mission, they will have 16x the number of pixels (i.e. sensing units), offer 'snapshot'-like imaging capability, have diffraction-limited pixels in the FIR, have better spatial and spectral resolution, and will be hybridized to readout integrated circuits (ROICs) via indium bump bonding.

Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University (2024)

M.S., Aerospace Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University (2021)

B.S. (with honors), Aerospace Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University (2019)

Far-infrared space-based remote sensing

Thermopile detectors

Micro/nanofabrication

Nanotechnology

• Sensors, Microdevices and Instruments  | Nano- And Micro- Devices/Systems
• Sensors, Microdevices and Instruments  | Remote/In Situ/Life Detection Instruments And Sensors

• Remote Sensing  
• far-infrared  
• far-infrared sensors  
• microfabrication  
• nanofabrication  
• thermopile  

Eom, B. H., Pepper, B., Braga Nogueira Branco, R., Greenhagen, B. T., and Kenyon, M. E. (2025). “Development of a next-generation thermopile detector for cold-body space applications”, IEEE Sensors, https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2025.3595487

Braga Nogueira Branco, R., H. Eom, B., Pepper, B., & E. Kenyon, M. (2025). Development of a high-fill-factor thermopile array for space-borne far-infrared radiometry. 2025 SPIE Sensors + Imaging Conference. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3069739.

Braga Nogueira Branco, R., H. Eom, B., Pepper, B., & E. Kenyon, M. (2025). Fabrication of Cantilever Absorber Structures for Enhanced Performance of Space-Based Far-Infrared Thermopile Detectors. 2025 50th International Conference on Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves (IRMMW-THz). 10.1109/IRMMW-THz61557.2025.11320028

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S5d6p9sAAAAJ&hl=en