Congratulations to Jessica Boles for her first-place win at the recent CURENT Perfect Pitch Competition. On Friday, September 18th, seven students including Jessica pitched their research in front of a group of experienced judges. Each student had just ninety seconds to present their idea accompanied by one simple, yet effective powerpoint slide. A panel of five judges analyzed the pitches based on the presentation of the problem, proposed solution, and broader impact.
This year, wireless charging of ariel drones using transmission lines captured the judge’s attention. Building off of her recent work at the National Transportation Research Center, Jessica proposed a method for wirelessly charging ariel drones for inspecting transmission lines. Ms. Boles will now take her pitch on the road to the 2015 NSF ERC-wide Perfect Pitch competition in Washington, D.C. at the end of October. There, she will face off with students from the other ERCs for the chance to win a grand prize of $5000.
Second place went to May Mahmoudi for her presentation on "Distributed Control Agent for Power Grid” and third place went to Micah Till for his pitch on a “Simple Dynamic Power Systems Load Modeling.” Thank you to all of the students who participated and to the judges, which included several students from the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Graduate Research and Education and two prominent scientists from Oak Ridge National Lab.
From L to R: Liu Liu, Saeed Anwar, Can Huang, Ailin Asadinejad, May Mahmoudi, MIcah Till and Jessica Boles
