With over 40% of society's energy consumed within the electric power sector, power electronics is often either the bottleneck or key enabler for an extremely diverse range of applications. This rapidly expanding area of study is well poised to have direct and positive impacts on efforts in energy sustainability, renewable integration, electric vehicles, hydrogen production, portable and biomedical devices, data centers, and aerospace --- to name only a few.

Having recently joined UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering, I serve as a power electronics specialist, with broader experience in vehicle electrification and analog & mixed signal integrated circuit design. My core research contributions include the development of advanced hybrid-switched-capacitor (HSC) power converter architectures and associated control and circuit techniques. This work has been funded extensively by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, NASA JPL, NSF, DARPA, and a growing list of industrial partners with whom I have worked closely to promote rapid adoption of state-of-the-art energy conversion techniques. Having worked within Berkeley's Power and Energy Center (BPEC) [2020-2024], I have mentored a large number of graduate students whose work is on track to help revolutionize modern energy consumption across many sectors.

Biography:

Nathan M. Ellis [Senior Member, IEEE] was born in Cork, Ireland. He received the B.S. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, in 2013, and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA, in 2017 and 2020, respectively. During this time he was funded in part by both Texas Instruments and the U.S. Dept. of Education in recognition of research excellence in areas of national need (GAANN).
He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA. From 2020 to 2024, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.

He conducts research in the area of power electronics, with interests in circuit topologies, modeling and control, mixed-signal integrated circuit design, and high-performance hardware. His work has been applied to data-center power delivery, satellite systems, renewable-energy technologies, biomedical devices, and electric vehicles. He has authored more than 40 journal and conference publications, holds four U.S. patents, and has coauthored two IEEE prize papers. Dr. Ellis was the recipient of the Best Graduate Researcher by UC Davis’ Industrial Affiliates in 2017, the Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in 2020, recognition for "Instructor Teaching Effectiveness that greatly exceeds the Departmental average" at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021, and the Best Technical Lecturer Award at the IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference in both 2021 and 2024.