Yuhao Zhang has joined ECE as an assistant professor. As a member of the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES), Zhang will be advancing semiconductor technology in power electronics and energy engineering.

Zhang comes to Virginia Tech from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was a postdoctoral associate investigating gallium nitride-based vertical power devices in the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

Zhang plans to extend his research to simulating, fabricating, and characterizing power electronic devices based on wide-bandgap semiconductor systems.

He is also exploring methods of integrating novel radio frequency and power devices in microwave circuits and power electronic converters; applying emerging devices in transportation and information systems; and developing devices, circuits, and systems for extreme environments.

In 2016, Zhang was a visiting scholar at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and in 2015, he worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory as a power device research intern. In this role, he proposed and simulated novel gallium nitride-diamond integrations for the high-power and high-frequency applications in communication systems and high-power motors.

Zhang has four patents in semiconductor technology with three additional patents pending. In 2017, he received the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories Doctoral Dissertation Seminar Award.

Zhang earned his B.S. in physics from Peking University in Bejing, and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.