written by Daniel Costinett
submitted on 2020-06-24 21:02:08

Visitors from DOE along with UTK PoTenntial trainees and professors following a lab tour

Members of the US Department of Energy including Anant Agarwal, Senior Advisor for Wide Bandgap Technology in the Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy division visited the University of Tennessee Knoxville to review the newly-formed PoTenntial traineeship program on Friday.  

Dr. Agarwal was accompanied by Pawel Gradzki, and Ziaur Rahman, of DOE; Al Hefner from NIST; Laura Marlino from ORNL; and Steve Walsh from Power America.

This visit represented an "opening ceremonies" of sorts for the PoTenntial traineeship, which had its first semester of students arriving in August for the Fall semester.  A cohort of 11 US citizen graduate students from around the nation will begin pursuing their MS or PhD degrees in power electronics with an emphasis in wide bandgap technologies in PoTenntial.

During the visit, representatives from DOE emphasized the necessity to continue innovation in power electronics in the presence of a revolution in device technologies.