researcher under Dr. Brandon Grainger. His research interests are focused on applications of quasi-z-source inverters in renewable energy and microgrid systems. In his time as an M.S. student, he has coauthored two papers, and has also completed a summer internship at Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, Inc. In that role, he performed transients analysis on a variety of power systems, bench-marked the control performance of STATCOMs and SVCs, and developed a power dispatch schedule for a battery energy storage system.
JOHN KIEFFER received his B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Centre College in 2014. Following completion of his B.S. he worked for Wilderness Trace Solar, Inc. in Danville, KY where he designed and helped implement gridtied, off-grid, and hybrid solar energy systems for residential and commercial customers ranging up to 300 kW in size. John is currently a second-year M.S. student at the University of Pittsburgh where he is advised by Dr. Gregory Reed with whom he co-led a sustainable engineering study abroad trip to Scandinavia for undergraduate students this past May. His research interests include the optimal control and dispatch of distributed energy resources.
ARYANA NAKHAI graduated Cum Laude from the University of Pittsburgh in December 2018, with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a concentration in Electric Power. As part of her undergraduate degree, she completed 3 co-op rotations at BMW Manufacturing. She is currently pursuing an M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh under the advisory of Dr. Gregory Reed. While holding an intern role at Eaton, she is also President and founder of a new IEEE Power & Energy Society student branch chapter at Pitt and holds a position on the Student Innovation Board for a DOE Consortium program known as FEEDER.
CHRISTIAN PERENYI is a second year M.S student at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a French exchange student in his final year of engineering at INSA de Lyon (France) in the ECE department. During his undergrad he had the opportunity to realize a first internship in UK (Telford) in Schneider Electric. Christian
also did a five month internship in Colombia (Bogota) at Enel; an Italian multinational manufacturer and distributor of electricity and gas. He was part of the technical support in thermal generation for Colombia & Brazil. His research concerns the frequency response of inverters inside a Power Grid. He is currently a research full time assistant under Dr. Brandon Grainger’s supervision.
COREY WEIMANN received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2018. He is a graduate student in the Electric Power Systems Laboratory. His research focus is DC arc flash, particularly experimental results, under his advisors Dr. Robert Kerestes, and Dr. Brandon Grainger. His research goals are to determine when DC arc flash events are possible and at what minimum system parameters they start occurring at typical industrial installations. He is partnering with a company that does high power testing and is willing to perform arc flash tests.
Electric Power Industry Conference 2019
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