He has broad research interests spanning from emerging hardware design for efficient computing (photonics, post-CMOS electronics, quantum), hardware-algorithm co-design, efficient AI/ML algorithms, and electronic-photonic design automation.

Dr. Gu has authored 80+ peer-reviewed international journal/conference papers in above area. He has received Best Paper Award at ASP-DAC 2020, selected as one out of 6 Best Paper Finalists at DAC 2020, won First Place at the ACM/SIGDA Student Research Competition (SRC) held at ICCAD 2020, received the Best Poster Award at NSF Workshop on Machine Learning Hardware 2020, won First Place at the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals 2021, received the Best Paper Award at IEEE TCAD 2021, won the Robert S. Hilbert Memorial Optical Design Competition 2022, won Margarida Jacome Dissertation Prize at UT Austin ECE (2023), and won Outstanding Dissertation Award at UT Austin (2024). He served as a technical committee member for ICCAD 2023 and technical reviewers for over 18+ international journals/conferences, such as IEEE TCAD, TODAES, DAC, ICCAD, ISVLSI, GLVLSI, IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TNNLS, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, IROS, Nature Communications, Science Advances, IEEE JSTQE, APL, IEEE PTL, etc. He also served as the Technical Program Committee member of ICCAD, ICCD, etc.