CV

Education

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley · Aug 2022 – present
- PhD candidate, major in signal processing. GPA: 4.0/4.0. Advisor: Prof. Laura Waller.
- Research focus: signal processing, image reconstruction, and inverse problems in computational imaging.
- Selected coursework: Computational Imaging (A+), Optimization Models in Engineering (A+), Neural Computation (A+), Intro to Computer Vision and Computational Photography (A).
B.S. in Electronic and Information Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China · Sep 2018 – Jul 2022
- GPA: 3.776/4.000 (ranked 1/50 in the EIE Department).

Ross N. Tucker Memorial Award · Apr 2026
SPIE-BACUS Scholarship · Nov 2025
AEON Scholarship, Peking University · Jan 2021
Merit Student, Peking University (top 10% of students each academic year) · 2019, 2020, 2021

Kevin C. Zhou, Chaoying Gu, Muneki Ikeda, Tina M. Hayward, Nicholas Antipa, Rajesh Menon, Roarke Horstmeyer, Saul Kato, Laura Waller. “Large-scale compressive microscopy via diffractive multiplexing across a sensor array.” Nature Photonics, 2026. [paper] [code]
Chaoying Gu, Markus Benk, Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla, Kenneth A. Goldberg, Laura Waller. “Enhanced extreme ultraviolet mask imaging with Fourier ptychographic microscopy.” J. Micro/Nanopattern. Mater. Metrol. 25(3), 2026. [paper] [code]
Chaoying Gu, Talha Sultan, Khadijeh Masumnia-Bisheh, Laura Waller, Andreas Velten. “Fast Non-line-of-sight Imaging with Non-planar Relay Surfaces.” IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP), 2023. [paper] [code]

Chaoying Gu, Kevin C. Zhou, Laura Waller. “Neural Network-Accelerated Reconstruction for High-Spatiotemporal-Throughput Video Microscopy of Freely Moving Organisms.” Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging (COSI), Optica Publishing Group, 2025. (Oral presentation)
Chaoying Gu, Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla, Markus Benk, Kenneth A. Goldberg, Laura Waller. “Enhanced EUV mask imaging using Fourier ptychographic microscopy.” SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning, 2025. (Oral presentation) [paper]
Chaoying Gu, Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla, Markus Benk, Kenneth A. Goldberg, Laura Waller. “Towards Full Field-of-View Fourier Ptychography for Extreme Ultraviolet Microscope.” IEEE Conference on Computational Imaging Using Synthetic Apertures (CISA), 2024. (Oral presentation) [paper]
Kevin C. Zhou, Chaoying Gu, et al. “High-throughput computational microscopy with diffractive multiplexing across a gigapixel-scale sensor array.” SPIE Photonics West, 2024. [paper]

Research Scientist Intern, Meta Reality Labs, Redmond, WA · May 2026 – Aug 2026
- Built a benchtop holographic display for AR glasses based on a wedge lightguide, using a phase light modulator (PLM) to correct its strongly spatially-varying aberrations.
- Trained an end-to-end model to calibrate PLM parameters and pupil modulation, and performed phase retrieval for local wavefront calibration of the lightguide.
Source Mask Optimization Intern, ASML, San Jose, CA · May 2025 – Aug 2025
- Explored and compared different regularizations in source-mask co-optimization for lithography.
- Developed a customized regularization method that improves adherence to specific design rules.

Pre-trained Diffusion Models for Optimization-Guided Deconvolution with Large Kernels — with Alex Mehta, Ajil Jalal, Amit Kohli, Laura Waller.
- Applied diffusion posterior sampling methods (DPS, Red-Diff, DDNM, EDM) to deconvolution problems with diffuser PSFs, identifying significant hallucination issues in existing methods.
- Investigating an optimization-inspired purification method to alleviate the trade-off between visual plausibility and measurement data fidelity.
Automatic Regularization for Label-Free Computational Microscopy — Imaging Residency with Biohub, in collaboration with the waveOrder team at Biohub SF · May 2026 – present.
- Learning regularization parameters directly from raw measurements, removing hand-tuning from the reconstruction pipeline.
- Scaling waveOrder to larger and more diverse datasets.

Head Teaching Assistant, EE120 Signals and Systems, UC Berkeley · Aug 2025 – Jan 2026
Teaching Assistant, EE120 Signals and Systems, UC Berkeley · Jan 2025 – May 2025
Teaching Assistant, Analysis and Design of Analog Circuits, Peking University · Sep 2021 – Jun 2022

Co-President, UC Berkeley Optics Chapter · Jun 2024 – present
- Organized technical seminars with speakers from diverse departments, universities, and industry, hosting 14 events in 2024 with an average attendance of 25 participants.
- Coordinated professional development events, including resume workshops and mock preliminary exams for first-year graduate students.
Volunteer, REACH Academy, Oakland · Mar 2024
- Taught science to TK–2 students, fostering curiosity and early STEM engagement through hands-on activities.

Amateur Minesweeper player — ranked in the top 1000 out of over 10 million players, with a personal best of 68 seconds on Expert.