Electrical & Computing Engineering

PCEC Student Accepted into NASA Pathways Engineering Trainee Program

March 18, 2024

Sebastian Oviedo is a student in the Paulson College of Engineering & Computing
currently studying Electrical Engineering with a minor in Physics. Oviedo was recently informed
that he has been accepted into the NASA Pathways Internship Program for Engineering.

NASA’s Pathways Internship Program offers internships in a variety of disciplines, and
invests heavily in the growth of students. Students that complete this program earn the
opportunity to be evaluated for full-time employment with NASA upon their graduation.

Masoud Davari, Associate Professor in the department of Electrical & Computer
Engineering, has supervised Oviedo in various contexts, and attributes Oviedo’s success to his
ambition. According to Dr. Davari, Oviedo has been informally attending his upper level courses
since he was an undergraduate research student.

In addition to prioritizing being proactive in his studies, Dr. Davari also noted Oviedo’s
participation in the NSF-IRES-INNOVATOR Program in Summer 2023. This program allows
students the opportunity to participate in an international research project to assess and improve
the reliability of two-level voltage-source converters employing innovative controls in a possible
globe-spanning supergrid—an essential component of the energy sector to integrate renewables
and battery systems to respond to urgent environmental concerns caused by climate change and
global warming at an alarming rate and international agreements.

The NSF-IRES-INNOVATOR Program operates from two locations—the Laboratory for
Advanced Power and Energy Systems (LAPES) founded, directed, and led by Dr. Davari in
Engineering and Research Building right here on Georgia Southern’s Statesboro campus and the
Center of Reliable Power Electronics (CORPE) at Aalborg University (AAU) in Aalborg,
Denmark. Post-trip follow-ups are conducted in LAPES at Georgia Southern.

Dr. Davari is the lead Principal Investigator of this NSF-funded project and works alongside
Professor Frede Blaabjerg, Villum Investigator in the Department of AAU Energy at AAU, in
order to provide students with interdisciplinary, multicultural, cutting-edge research experiences.

Oviedo not only participated in the NSF-IRES-INNOVATOR Program last summer—whose
work will be presented at the IEEE SoutheastCon 2024 conference in March 2024 and published
in its proceedings—but he has also been selected to participate in the program this summer for
his second consecutive year.

To follow more student successes in the PCEC, be sure to connect with us on social
media: https://linktr.ee/gscec.

---