News

BPEC researchers Syed Tahmid Mahbub and Nagesh Patle are recipients of the 2025 Graduate Research Grants from the nonprofit organization Hearts to Humanity Eternal (H2H8). This broadly defined award is granted to thirty graduate researchers each year to fund research that improves world-affecting problems like climate change or furthers advancements in medicine, space exploration, artificial intelligence, and more. Nagesh’s graduate research centers upon ultra-efficient, ultra-dense hybrid switched-capacitor power converters for data center and automotive systems to ease the power delivery limits that constrain modern AI and advanced computing. Tahmid’s graduate research addresses practical challenges in power electronics to help accelerate the adoption of renewable energy and electric transportation, and to reduce power consumption in data centers.

Read Tahmid’s and Nagesh’s features in the H2H8 EECS page here: https://h2h8.com/explorer-categories/electrical-engineering-computer-sciences/

Graduate student Nagesh Patle received the 2025 Timothy B. Campbell Innovation Award, which is granted once per year to a computer science or electrical engineering graduate student who demonstrates a spirit of innovation, collaboration, and creativity in their work and method. The award honors the memory of Timothy B. Campbell, a former Ph.D. student working on digital fabrication and the human-computer interface at UC Berkeley, before he passed away from cancer in 2015. As part of receiving this award, Nagesh met with the Campbell family to learn more about Timothy’s work, life, and impact. You can watch Nagesh’s acceptance speech in the video below, and read more about the Timothy B. Campbell Innovation Award at this link: http://campbellscholar.org/. Past winners of the award are listed at this page: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Students/Awards/100/.

Visiting Ph.D student Leheng Wang was recognized for his technical achievements and research in the areas of resonant converters in EV chargers and data center power conversion by the IEEE Power Electronics Society. The IEEE PELS Graduate Studies Fellowships are awarded yearly to visiting scholars whose work aligns closely with the mission of PELS. Leheng Wang is a 4th year student visiting the Pilawa Group from the Kai Sun Group at Tsinghua University in China. Read more here: https://www.ieee-pels.org/announcements/congratulations-to-our-2025-pels-award-winners/ and here: https://www.ieee-pels.org/awards/graduate-studies-fellowship-and-john-g-kassakian-fellowship/. We are ecstatic that Leheng has been able to join us these past few months!

Syed Tahmid Mahbub has been named one of the 2025 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows, a national, merit-based award granted to new Americans pursuing research at the graduate level. He is recognized both for his award-winning research in the Pilawa Group and for his educational contributions to multiple universities in the United States. Tahmid’s research in the Pilawa Group centers around reducing datacenter power consumption and facilitating the adoption of renewable energy and electrified transportation. He has contributed as a teaching assistant both to the power electronics curricula at the University of California, Berkeley and to embedded systems curricula at his undergraduate alma mater, Cornell University. Tahmid also maintains a popular blog to help budding engineers navigate educational resource scarcity. You can read more about Tahmid’s award at this link: https://pdsoros.org/fellows/syed-tahmid-mahbub/