A Pocket-Sized Electronics Lab

Angie Mercurio ’17 MS dreamed of becoming a Disney roboticist. But as an undergrad, she never had access to her school’s electronics lab, partly due to limited availability — so she didn’t pick up the requisite hands-on electrical engineering skills.

“I got an A-plus in circuits because I was really good at the math and theory,” she says, “but I never really got to build anything.”

Then, as a master’s student in Northwestern’s Engineering Design Innovation program, she discovered nLab — a credit card–sized device that turns your laptop into an electronics lab. Created in 2014 by engineering professor Nick Marchuk ’10 MS and David Meyer ’12 MS, ’15 PhD (now an engineering manager at Apple), the nLab toolkit gives students a chance to practice hands-on circuit-building.

Using nLab, Mercurio gained the skills and confidence to build a tech design portfolio that helped her land a job at Disney.

A few years later, when a colleague saw nLab on Mercurio’s desk and expressed interest in it, Mercurio realized others could benefit from nLab too. She quit her job and applied to the Kellogg School of Management to focus on nLab’s business development.

An MBA student and Zell Fellow, Mercurio is now nLab’s CEO, and Marchuk, her husband and co-founder, is chief product officer. In 2025 nLab won multiple awards at Northwestern’s VentureCat and Jumpstart Demo Day competitions.  

A Lab on the Go  

Plug the pocket-sized nLab into your laptop, fire up the nLab app, and you have all the tools of an electronics lab at your fingertips. nLab replicates the functionality of an oscilloscope (used to measure and visualize electrical signals), a function generator (used for testing and troubleshooting circuits) and a power supply unit. These expensive machines are “toaster oven–sized and haven’t changed since the 1960s,” Mercurio says. By comparison, the nLab kit weighs only 2 pounds and “allows you to prototype from anywhere in the world.” 

All in One 

The nLab starter kit comes with 200 circuitry components — everything needed to build a microphone, a video game controller, a heart monitor, a thermostat and eventually your own inventions. 

Crucial Tech Skills  

nLab’s free YouTube educational platform provides the circuit-building know-how. “You come away with a college-level understanding of how electronics work,” says Mercurio. With the growing demand for AI infrastructure, “there’s a huge global shortage of electronics engineers,” she adds. nLab is targeted toward self-motivated students looking for an on-ramp into electronics and older adults seeking skills to get into the field.