Lei Gu Assistant Professor @ Penn Engineering

Penn Power Electronics Research Lab (PENGUIN Lab)

Welcome! We are a research group passionate about building circuits — especially in the field of power electronics. Our focus is on creating efficient, compact systems that power exciting technologies, including renewable energy platforms, AI hardware, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines, semiconductor processing tools, robotics, and electric vehicles. Here are some highlights from our past work.

Our research is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from circuits, electromagnetics, optics, piezoelectricity, semiconductor devices, and control theory. If any of this sparks your interest, feel free to reach out! Here are a few of the areas we’re currently exploring:

Innovative power delivery: Inductive power transfer, integrated optical power delivery and sensing;
Miniaturized energy conversion: High-frequency circuits, wide-bandgap semiconductors, integrated power management, piezoelectric passives;
Powering medical technologies: MRI, ultrasound, X-rays, and implantable devices.

Members

About Me

I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. My research focuses on power electronics, energy conversion, and medical devices. I’m also a visiting researcher with the Circuits Group at NVIDIA Research, where I work on power delivery for data centers. Before that, I was part of an incredible team at Apple working on the HomePod. I earned my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2019.

(Here is a more formal bio in the third-person.)

Join Us

We are looking for 1–2 highly motivated Ph.D. students to join our group in Spring or Fall 2026. If you’re interested, please fill out the interest form.

I expect to take on new graduate students in the near future. If you’re interested in working with me at Penn, please apply to the Penn Engineering graduate program and mention my name in your application. While I appreciate the interest, I receive many emails from prospective students and may not be able to respond to each one in detail. I usually take 1–2 new students per year and make decisions after reviewing the full pool of applicants in January. For master’s students, I recommend starting by taking my course ESE5800 or ESE6710.

Updates

[June 2025] Congratulations to Victor, Aobo, and Sida for receiving the IEEE ITEC+ 2025 Best Student Paper Award for their paper, “Analysis and Comparison of Compensation Networks for Multi-Megahertz Inductive Power Transfer.”

[June 2025] We received the NSF CAREER Award.

[May 2025] Aloha! Aobo presented his energy-efficient pulsed magnet and amplifier for MRI applications at the 2025 ISMRM Annual Meeting in Honolulu, HI.