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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/

Recent Pilawa Group graduates Dr. Rahul Iyer and current postdoctoral scholar Dr. Yicheng Zhu have each been awarded the 2025 PELS Ph.D. Thesis Talk Award! This award is granted yearly to outstanding graduates who have defended their thesis and submit an additional video submission to the IEEE Power Electronics Society. Participants are judged based on the achieved outcomes of their work in power electronics, the rigor of their design methodology, net contribution to the progress of the field, and quality of presentation. Dr. Iyer and Dr. Zhu are among a total of five worldwide winners for the current academic year.

Dr. Iyer’s talk can be viewed below:

Dr. Zhu’s talk can be viewed below:

The Berkeley Power and Energy Center’s very own Professor Jessica Boles was a past recipient of this award in 2023. Pilawa Group alumnus Dr. Zichao Ye was a past recipient of this award in 2021.

Read more about the 2025 winners–and past winners–of the award here: https://www.ieee-pels.org/awards/pels-ph-d-thesis-talk-p3-talk/.

The Pilawa Research Group is very pleased to introduce our 2025 cohort! Harry Choi and Khalid Durani come from strong research backgrounds in their respective fields, and we are delighted to see what problems they tackle over the course of their graduate careers. Please see their bios below:

Seokwon (Harry) Choi received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea, in 2025. Before joining BPEC, he was a graduate student researcher in the Electric Energy Conversion Lab at Seoul National University. His research interests include the design and control of switched-capacitor converters and high-frequency power conversion. Harry is a recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship and the KFAS Overseas PhD Scholarship.

Khalid Durani received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2023. His research interests include the dynamic modeling and control of power converters.

Once again, a very warm welcome to our new students!

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!

Graduate student Rahul Iyer received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences on May 24th, 2025. His dissertation was titled “Dynamical Modeling and Control of the Flying Capacitor Multilevel Converter.” Post-graduation, Rahul will begin working at Tesla, Inc. on the Power Electronics Controls for Energy Products team. Congratulations!

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/

Three researchers from the Pilawa Research Group received prestigious awards for outstanding oral and poster presentations at the 40th IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC 2025), held in Atlanta, GA. APEC is the premier conference in power electronics, attracting leading experts worldwide.

Syed Tahmid Mahbub, a second-year EE Ph.D student advised by EECS Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, received the Best Oral Presentation Award for his talk titled “Analysis and Implementation of Minimum-Sensor Capacitor Voltage Estimators for Flying Capacitor Multilevel Converters.”

Nagesh Patle, a third-year EE Ph.D student advised by EECS Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, earned the Best Poster Presentation Award for his work on “Achieving Soft-Charging and Over 20% Input Current Ripple Reduction in a 48-to-6 V Dickson Converter Using 3-Phase Split-Phase Control.”

Yicheng Zhu, a postdoctoral scholar and EECS alumnus, advised by EECS Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, was recognized with the Best Oral Presentation Award for his talk titled “Design-Oriented Modeling and Multi-Objective Optimization of Two-Phase Coupled Inductors in Multiphase PWM Converters.”

The APEC Best Presentation Awards recognize outstanding contributions based on several criteria: the quality and design of presentation slides, the clarity and effectiveness of delivery, and the presenter’s ability to engage with and respond to audience questions.

Rod Bayliss III, a fifth-year PhD student advised by Dr. Robert Pilawa-Podgusrki, won a 2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for his role as a GSI in the inaugural offering of EE 213B, Power Electronics Design, taught by Dr. Jessica Boles. This award honors UC Berkeley GSIs each year for their outstanding work in teaching on the Berkeley campus. The semester before the class was offered, Rod designed and tested a custom buck converter for the class. The students used this board to create their own buck converters, learning practical power converter design and testing skills.

BPEC Director Robert Pilawa-Podgurski was elevated to IEEE fellow in the 2024 class, “For contributions to hybrid switched capacitor power converters”. IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number of fellows selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total voting Institute membership. Robert received his award at IEEE ECCE in Phoenix this past year. This is a great recognition of the all the hard work by past and present BPEC students!

EECS grad Yicheng Zhu has received a Teaching Effectiveness Award for 2024.

The Graduate Division’s Teaching Effectiveness Award for GSIs honors those who devise solutions to teaching or learning problems they have identified in their classes and write them up in a one-page essay. These essays are published on the GSI Center website for use by instructors.

Zhu’s essay, “Fostering Student Engagement: The Power of Live Class Demonstrations,” emphasizes his approach to enhancing student engagement in large lecture formats. Through the implementation of interactive group activities and targeted feedback mechanisms during the 2023 semester, he successfully created a more inclusive environment that encouraged student participation and fostered a deeper understanding of the material.

Yicheng Zhu is a postdoctoral scholar and Bakar Innovation Fellow advised by Robert Pilawa-Podgurski.

Submitted by nluechin on October 17, 2024

https://eecs.berkeley.edu/news/vivek-bharadwaj-and-yicheng-zhu-receive-teaching-effectiveness-award/

Graduate students Francesca Giardine, Kelly Fernandez (PhD, Fall 2023), along with Dr. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski have won Best Paper Award at IEEE Energy Conversion Conference and Expo – Europe.

They presented A Two-Stage Non-Isolated Hybrid Switched-Capacitor Microinverter Utilizing a Fixed-Ratio Resonant DC-DC Stage with Startup Functionality and Flying Capacitor Multilevel DC-AC Stage. Their work demonstrated a 500W two-stage microinverter solution for residential scale solar that uses exclusively hybrid switched-capacitor converter topologies to convert a 35V DC voltage to a 240V AC voltage. The hardware prototype achieved a competitive power density and efficiency, meeting the growing need for compact solutions for residential-scale renewables.

The paper was presented at ECCE – Europe in Darmstadt, Germany. ECCE brings together academics and industry professionals from around the world to exchange ideas about the energy transition. The best papers were chosen based on the quality of the technical results, paper, and presentation.

Submitted by Sarah Douglas on September 5, 2024

https://bpec.berkeley.edu/pilawa-group-graduate-students-win-best-paper-award-at-ecce-europe/

Rahul K. Iyer, S. Tahmid Mahbub, and Robert C.N. Pilawa-Podgurski have won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2024 IEEE International Communications Energy Conference (INTELEC) for their paper “Quasi- Two-Level Switching for Active Balancing of Flying Capacitor Multilevel Converters Under Light-Load Conditions” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10678933/)

Recent work in the Pilawa group has highlighted the design of “active-balancing” controllers to ensure the safe operation of high-performance Flying Capacitor Multilevel (FCML) converters during system transients. This work builds on broader efforts to study the converter dynamics and design stable high-bandwidth controllers. In particular, this work highlights techniques to ensure stable converter operation when the load current is small. Compared to prior work relying on Phase-Shifted Pulse-Width Modulation, the proposed switching scheme enables active balancing at average load currents approaching and equal to zero. The conference paper and oral presentation given at IEEE INTELEC 2024 highlight the proposed switching and control methods and showcase the practical implementation of the controller on industry-standard digital signal processor hardware.

They are continuing to work on additional characterization of the balancing controller at different operating conditions, and aim to apply the proposed technique to demonstrate safe startup of the converter at light-load conditions.

Submitted by Sarah Douglas on October 20, 2024

https://bpec.berkeley.edu/rahul-iyer-and-tahmid-mahbub-win-best-paper-award-at-ieee-intelec-2024/

We are pleased to introduce the newest members of our PhD cohort at the Pilawa Group: Emmi Wyttenbach, Dennis Woo, and Shuyu Zhang.

Emmi Wyttenbach joins us from Cornell University, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree in 2024. During her time at Cornell, she conducted power electronics research under Prof. Khurram Afridi, focusing on the development of active energy buffer solutions. Outside of her academic pursuits, Emmi is an avid soccer player and enjoys running and swimming.

Shuyu Zhang completed her Bachelor’s degree at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in China in 2023, followed by Master’s studies at Stanford University before joining Berkeley. With a passion for Anime, comics, and games (ACG), Shuyu has been an active cosplayer at anime conventions since 2016. She also has a keen interest in photography.

Dennis Woo graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor’s degree in 2023 and a Master’s degree in 2024. His research background includes high-frequency power electronics and wide-bandgap semiconductor materials. Outside of work, Dennis enjoys exploring the outdoors,
and he spends his time with photography, soccer, volleyball, and climbing.

We look forward to supporting their growth and contributions to the group and are excited for the perspectives they bring!

Having spent the past four years with UC Berkeley, Dr. Ellis is moving to the University of California Santa Cruz — Baskin School of Engineering. Here his research group will be hosted at UCSC’s Westside Research Park, a stone’s throw from Natural Bridges State Beach.

During his time at UC Berkeley, Dr. Ellis collaborated extensively with BPEC researchers, contributing to the development of high-density power electronics and renewable energy systems. His teaching contributions have also earned him UC Berkeley’s recognition for “teaching effectiveness that greatly exceeds the departmental average”.

The Pilawa-Group would like to wish him the best of luck in his continuing academic career!

Prof. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski has received the 2024 Spark Award from Bakar Fellows Program, with Dr. Yicheng Zhu as his Innovation Fellow. Their awarded research proposal, titled “Powering the AI Revolution: A New Voltage Regulator Enabling Direct 48-V-to-1-V Vertical Power Delivery for Next-Generation Ultra-High-Power Processors,” aims to make use of innovative tools and techniques designed in Prof. Pilawa’s lab to develop a hybrid switched-capacitor voltage regulation module for ultra-high-power processors that can achieve a 2x reduction in power conversion losses and a 4x reduction in physical size compared to state-of-the-art commercial products. This could reduce overall data center power usage by almost ten percent, benefiting both the environment and businesses.

The Bakar Fellows Program has been committed to expanding access to entrepreneurship since its inception in 2012, providing funding, resources, and mentorship to faculty, graduate students, and, most recently, undergraduates. This year marks the beginning of a new partnership with the Academic Innovation Catalyst (AIC), a new deep tech funding platform founded by Matt and Lisa Sonsini. Initially, AIC will join forces with the Bakar Fellows program to allocate grants to Berkeley faculty immersed in deep technology exploration, particularly in climate technology. Grant recipients will receive $300,000 over three years for market research, prototype development and other commercialization activities, in line with the standard Bakar Fellows award amount and duration. AIC envisions expanding this pilot initiative across UC Berkeley and beyond, fostering innovation on a broader scale within the academic community. The inaugural recipients of the AIC grants are Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, a UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences professor, and Zakaria Al Balushi, a UC Berkeley Materials Science and Engineering assistant professor.

Graduate student Yicheng Zhu received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences on May 18th, 2024. His dissertation was titled “High-Performance Hybrid Switched-Capacitor Power Converters: Circuit Topologies, Control Techniques, and Analytical Models.” Congratulations!

Graduate student Rose Abramson received her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences on May 18th, 2024. Her dissertation was titled “Split-Phase and Multi-Resonant Operation of Hybrid Switched-Capacitor Converters.”

Graduate student Sahana Krishnan received her Master of Science degree on May 14th, 2024. Her master’s thesis is titled “An EMI-Compliant and Automotive-Rated 48 V to Point-of-Load Dickson-Based Hybrid Switched-Capacitor DC-DC Converter.” Congratulations!

Post-doctoral scholar Dr. Yicheng Zhu has received a Ross N. Tucker Memorial Award for 2024.

The Tucker Award is given to recognize superior work and scholarship in the characterization, development and/or use of semiconductor, magnetic, optical or electronic materials by a graduate student or students pursuing such areas of inquiry. This award memorializes Dr. Ross N. Tucker, who contributed significantly to the advancement of the technology of materials used in semiconductor electronics. More details about this award can be found on the EECS Department website. Dr. Zhu’s thank you video can be viewed here. (edited)