Minjie Chen receives junior faculty award for outstanding teaching and research

By Office of Engineering Communications

The School of Engineering and Applied Science is honoring six assistant professors for early-career excellence in research and teaching. This year’s junior faculty award recipients will each receive $50,000 to support their research. One is the Andlinger Center’s Minjie Chen.

Chen, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, leads the Princeton Power Electronics Research Lab. His team is reimagining the power and energy systems of the future, from theory to applications. They aim to make fundamental breakthroughs in power electronics to enable important and emerging applications, including smarter power electronics at the grid edge, smaller power electronics for robotics and electric vehicles, ultra-efficient power electronics for information and data systems, and design methods and software tools for power electronics and system architectures. Chen received a 2019 NSF CAREER award, as well as 2019 and 2022 commendations for outstanding teaching from Princeton Engineering. Along with colleagues at Intel, Google and Dartmouth College, Chen’s group recently developed systems that increase power delivery to high-speed computers by 10 times beyond the current state of the art. In nominating Chen, department chair James Sturm said, “The strength of his lab is its integrated nature. One end is work on the theory of such circuits and how to model them, especially when multiple energy forms are present. On the other end, complete energy control and management systems built in his lab are going out the door for testing at industrial collaborators such as Intel. This end-to-end approach requires high energy, but the synergies lead to new advances that could only happen in a few places.”

This full story originally appeared on the School of Engineering and Applied Science website.