Biography

Yu Gu joined the faculty at Juniata College in 2016 after working as an assistant professor of physics at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pa., since 2012.


She arrives at Juniata with extensive teaching experience at St. Joseph's, as well as extensive experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a postdoctoral associate and teaching assistant from 2007 to 2012. Gu has taught such courses as Quantum Mechanics, Newtonian Physics, Electricity and Magnetism and General Education Physics.


Gu was a postdoctoral associate at MIT from June 2011 to May 2012. She collaborated on research at Lehigh University and the University of Pennsylvania as well. Her research interest focus on designing, fabricating and characterizing lasers and optics devices. She has designed and built a laser processing setup during her time at St. Josephs.


She earned a bachelor's degree in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University in 2005. She went on to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science in 2011 from MIT.


During her graduate studies, Gu had the opportunity to work as a scholar/researcher at Milan Polytechnic University in Milan, Italy in 2008 and for the 2009-2010 academic year. She also worked as a research assistant at MIT from 2005 to 2007. As an undergraduate, she worked as a researcher on a project utilizing optical tweezers at SRI International, a molecular physics laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. in 2004, and on a project on noise-scattering reduction in real-time imaging at the Rochester Institute of Optics, in Rochester, N.Y., in 2003.


She has published scholarly research in such professional journals as Applied Optics, Lab on Chip, and Frontiers in Optics.