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Alumni

Monika Basnet, MSEE

Monika Basnet is from Kathmandu, Nepal. She received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu Nepal and received her M.S degree in Electrical Engineering at University of New Orleans, USA.

 

  • Electrification design engineer at Lifetime Engineering solutions, Jan 2017-Nov2018

 

Bikram Bhandari, E.I.T., MSEE

Bikram Bhandari is from Nepal. He received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. His undergraduate project was on “Bidirectional Battery Charging System”. He received his M.S in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Orleans. His research interest includes Power System protection, Smart Grid, and Electric machine. 

 

  • Relay Settings Engineer with Power Relaying Solutions, PLLC, Charlotte, NC,  9/2019 – Date
  • Contract Engineer (Relay Design), Entergy, New Orleans, LA, 12/2018 – 07/2019 
  • Research Assistant, PERL, University of New Orleans, 08/2017-12/2018
  • Electrical Engineer I (Substation Design), Mott MacDonald, New Orleans, LA, 06/2016-05/2017
  • Co-op Student (Transmission Planning), Entergy, New Orleans, LA, 01/2016-05/2016
  • Co-op Student (Transmission Design Basis), Entergy, New Orleans, LA, 04/2015-12/2015

Saiful Arefin Ratul MSEE, MS

Saiful Arefin Ratul grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He received a Bachelor of Science in Electronics and Telecommunications from North South University in 2012. Later on, he moved to the United States to seek his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. While doing his Master’s, he had the opportunity to work as an Intern at Entergy – New Orleans, in its Design Basis Group. After his graduation, he went on to work at Electrical Engineering Professional Services. He gained experience in power systems design but also developed a love for databases and programming. This persuaded him to return to school to pursue a second Master’s in Computer Science at the University of New Orleans.

Besides his interest is in Data Science and Machine Learning, Saiful is an avid moviegoer, video gamer and traveler.

Engineer

  • Electrical Engineering Professional Services, New Orleans (2017-2019)

    • Prepared information to setup or review Transmission materials
    • Reviewed Vendor Drawings according to the Purchase Specification Standard
    • Updated Standards for purchasing and installation
    • Created applications for automation and engineering design needs
    • Created libraries of functions and snippets that can be reused for future applications
    • Recreated source of problem, tested workarounds for fixing issues and patched program to correct errors
    • Documented program logic, coding and corrections
    • Updated work instruction documents as required
    • Provided training to engineers on application tools
    • Analyzed, modelled and mapped large data sets from various sources including SharePoint and Oracle Databases.

Intern

  • Entergy, New Orleans (2015-2016)
    • Provided support to Entergy Catalog Reconciliation and Cleanup of Material Data.
    • Conducted relay settings tests to ensure correct relay output functionality.
    • Develop SQL queries to streamline updated Entergy Manufacturer Database.
    • Replaced outdated tools with convenient and efficient ones (Excel, VBA).

Graduate Research Assistant

  • University of New Orleans (2014-2015)
    • Helped create first-ever DFR Test Plan for Entergy.
    • Created HyperSim schematics that enabled DFR ”hardware in the loop” (HIL) testing scenarios.
    • Conducted wiring and calibration of test equipment (Relays, DFR, etc.) at Entergy Jackson Lab.

Rochak Shiwakoti, E.I.T., MSEE

Rochak Shiwakoti earned his Bachelor of Science and Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering form the University of New Orleans in 2016 and 2019 respectively. He is currently working as a full time Protection and Control Settings Engineer with Power Relaying Solutions, PLLC, Charlotte, NC. His areas of research and interests includes power system engineering, motor modeling and simulation. He worked as research assistant for PERL lab from 2017-2019.  

 

  • Relay Settings Engineer with Power Relaying Solutions, PLLC, Charlotte, NC,  9/2019 – Date
  • Contract Engineer (Relay Design), Entergy, New Orleans, LA, 12/2018 – 07/2019 
  • Research Assistant, PERL, University of New Orleans, 08/2017-12/2018
  • Electrical Engineer I (Substation Design), Mott MacDonald, New Orleans, LA, 06/2016-05/2017
  • Co-op Student (Transmission Planning), Entergy, New Orleans, LA, 01/2016-05/2016
  • Co-op Student (Transmission Design Basis), Entergy, New Orleans, LA, 04/2015-12/2015

Bishwas Baral, E.I.T., MSEE

Bishwas Baral received his master’s degree from University of New Orleans (UNO). During his master’s degree he worked as a research assistant at UNO-Entergy Power & Energy Research (PERL) lab and researched in power system modeling, hardware-in-the-loop testing and protection. Currently, he is working at Entergy as a distribution asset planner.  

  • Distribution Asset Planner, Entergy, New Orleans, LA, 3/2019 – Date

  • Research Assistant, PERL, University of New Orleans, LA, 01/2017 – 02/2019

Nirdesh Neupane, MSEE

Nirdesh Neupane graduated Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Orleans in 2018. During his master’s degree, he researched design and analysis of electric motors under the supervision of Dr. Ebrahim Amiri and worked as a Teaching Assistant in the Electrical Engineering department.  Currently, he is working as a Product Engineer and CNC Programmer at Stevens Industries Inc, where he is involved in the design and development of the product, associated hardware and research in engineering innovation.

  • Product Engineer and CNC Programmer, Stevens Industries Inc, Illinois, 12/2018 – Date
  • Teaching Assistant, University of New Orleans, Louisiana, 1/2017 – 5/2018
  • Site Survey Engineer, Huawei Technologies, Nepal, 12/2014 – 07/2015
  1.  

Soledad Calderon

Raised and born in the South of Spain, city named Seville, came to the University of New Orleans on 2012 with a scholarship sponsored by the Tennis Team to study Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering. She played for the UNO tennis team for the entire duration of the bachelors degree, graduating in 2016 as Magna Cum Laude. During these four years, she represented the UNO tennis team in the Southland Conference (NCAA Division I), helping the team reaching semi-finals in conference tournament during her Junior year. She focused her EE degree in Energy and Power Systems and built an autonomous robot for her senior design project, where she was responsible for the power electronics part of the device. In 2016, she started her Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering and joined PERL, where she got involved in numerous projects. Her biggest contributions were in the analysis of the application of static VAR compensator in Hypersim and PSS/E. During this project, she worked with another engineer in the PERL team to study the differences between the static VAR compensator design in the two softwares. For her second year of masters and being part of PERL team, she had the opportunity to work as an engineer in the Transmission Engineering Department at Entergy Corporation, getting industry experience for the first time. In Entergy, she helped designing new tools and databases for the team to automate daily engineering routines and activities. She finished her Masters Degree with a project on energy and power systems where she studied how to optimize the cost of power plants taking into account their generating capacities as well as environmental constrains using different fuel technologies. After graduating from her masters, she started working at Apple on June of 2018 as a Power Automation and QA engineer in the Power & Performance team, where she currently works. In this role, she is a software engineer that works on managing and optimizing battery life for iOS devices at a sub-system level, finding opportunities to improve power consumption in the software as well as in the hardware. She is also responsible for hardware board bring-up, hardware design verification and debugging, maintaining current automation framework and create new test cases when needed.

Nandu Balachandran, P.E., MSEE

Nandu Balachandran has nearly 6 years of experience in Electrical Engineering, Utility projects & Project Execution. Currently, he is working as a Protection and Controls Engineer at Ampirical Solutions for various utility projects, considering the protection & automation aspects of design, utility requirements, and design standards. He has his P.E in the state of Texas. He graduated with his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from The University of New Orleans in 2016. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Mahatma Gandhi University, India in 2012.

Previously he was working as a Research Specialist for UNO Power & Energy Research Laboratory for about three years. He gained experience with evaluating and upgrading industrial power systems, including setting up, configuring and testing digital fault recorders (DFR), working with design, simulation, and modeling of electrical utility transmission lines with the help of Hypersim Real-Time Simulator.

His thesis research is based on optimizing of power system using optimal power flow and optimization of distributed energy resources on a Transactive Energy Framework which includes multilevel optimization of the system based on Utility power bids, distributed generation power bids, and customer payments.

His experience with Ampirical includes:

  • Expertise in working with multiple utility projects like Entergy and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) ranging from 13.8kV to 500kV Stations in several U.S states.
  • Expertise in working with various protection & control drawings including designing relay schemes, AC/DC schematics, single line diagrams, SCADA circuits, Circuits & Conduits, etc.
  • Working with Autocad and Microstation/Bentley
  • Project scoping and site walk-downs.
  • Project planning & executions. Project scoping, walk-downs, Design, design coordination and management, Project reviews, IFA, IFC, construction support, etc.

Malavika Menon, EIT, MSEE

Sowmya Munukuntla, E.I.T., MSEE

Sowmya Munukuntla graduated with Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of New Orleans (UNO) in May 2016. During her master’s program at UNO, she worked as a Graduate Research Assistant under the supervision of Dr. Parviz Rastgoufard focusing mainly on the sensitivity analysis of excitation system of the power generator for real-time studies along with modeling, dynamic analysis, and Hardware-in-Loop (HIL) testing on power systems. With the help of Dr. Rastgoufard and Dr. Ittiphong Leevongwat, she was able to put together her work into master’s thesis and an IEEE paper which was published under the title “Sensitivity Analysis of Synchronous Generators for Real-Time Simulations”.

She is currently working for Ford Motor Company as a Feature Engineer for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), working on Matlab/Simulink modeling for Model-in-Loop (MIL) and HIL testing along with the ownership of some Trailering features. Along the way, she worked on multiple HIL simulators including Opal-RT, National Instruments (NI), dSpace, ETAS for real-time studies.

  • Feature Engineer – Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, MI, 09/2019 – Date
  • Electronics Product Performance Engineer, Dura Automotive Systems, Auburn Hills, MI, 09/2018 – 09/2019
  • Project Engineer, EASi LLC (Client: Ford Motor Company), Allen Park, MI, 12/2016 – 09/2018
  • Fundamentals of Control Systems, Diesel – Certification, LHPU, Columbus, IN, 07/2016 – 08/2016
  • Research Specialist, UNO Power and Energy Research Laboratory (PERL), New Orleans, LA, 05/2016 – 07/2016
  • Graduate Research Assistant, UNO Power and Energy Research Laboratory (PERL), New Orleans, LA, 03/2014 – 05/2016