Thinking Outside the Box: Students meet Google's Little Box Challenge [Women to Watch]

Rachael Born and Xiaonan Zhao, two students from the Virginia Tech Future Energy Electronics Center (FEEC), know what it's like to be the only two women among all the other entrants waiting for the announcement of the winners of a US$1 million prize. The FEEC's eightperson team was a finalist in the Little Box Challenge, a worldwide Google- and IEEE-sponsored competition to reduce the size of inverters by using widebandgap devices and other techniques to achieve a high power density. Of the several hundred papers submitted, 18 were invited to submit hardware for testing. Prototypes were constantly run for several months at National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and subjected to 100 h of testing.