People

Hello! My name is Yicheng Zhu. I am currently a Postdoctoral Scholar and Bakar Innovation Fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where I work with Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski. I will be joining the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in January 2026.

I received my B.Eng. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2017 and 2020, respectively, and my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2024. My research interests include circuit topologies, control techniques, analytical modeling, and high-performance implementations of power electronics for computing and energy systems.

I have been fortunate to receive several awards and honors. In 2020, I received the IEEE Power and Energy Society Outstanding Student Scholarship, the Outstanding Tsinghua Master’s Thesis Award, and the Berkeley Fellowship. In 2023, I was awarded a Best Paper Award at the IEEE 24th Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) and a Best Paper Award at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Future Technologies Symposium. That same year, I was selected as a recipient of the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship, awarded annually to five Ph.D. students worldwide involved in research spanning all areas of computing innovation. In 2024, I received the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award and the Teaching Effectiveness Award from UC Berkeley, as well as the Ross N. Tucker Memorial Award from the UC Berkeley EECS Department for outstanding research. Most recently, in 2025, I received a Best Presentation Award at the IEEE 40th Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC) and the IEEE PELS Ph.D. Thesis Talk (P3 Talk) Award.