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 expertise 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 work closely to promote rapid adoption of state-of-the-art techniques in clean energy. Having worked within Berkeley's Power and Energy Center (BPEC) [2020-2024], I have co-advised a large number of graduate students whose work is on track to help revolutionize modern energy consumption across many sectors.

Biography:

Nathan Miles Ellis was born in Cork, Ireland. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University College Cork, Ireland, in 2013, and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis 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). Following four years with the University of California Berkeley, Dr. Ellis is currently with the University of California Santa Cruz within the Department of Electrical and Computer  Engineering. His primary area of research is power electronics where he is an author on over 30 journal and conference publications. His interests include vehicle electrification, renewable energy integration, datacenter power delivery, biomedical devices, aerospace, mixed signal integrated circuit design, control and circuit techniques. Dr. Ellis was named Best Graduate Researcher by UC Davis’ Industrial Affiliates in 2017 and he received the title of Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in 2020. Since then he has co-authored two IEEE prize papers and was awarded Best Technical Lecturer on Hybrid DC-DC converters at the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC) in both 2021 and 2024.