Varsha Borkar ’27 is no stranger to the STEM-SI (STEM Summer Institutes at Lehigh University) program: she’s now in her second summer working in Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Javad Khazaei’s INTEGrated, Resilient, and IntelligenT energY systems (INTEGRITY) Laboratory. But she’s not bored. Rather, she feels she’s deepening and expanding her knowledge and understanding of electrical engineering.
The Lehigh Valley native has long been interested in circuits and energy–she was fascinated by the dimmer lights her father, who worked with Lutron, brought home and even turned her middle school science projects into renewables research. In high school, Varsha spent time on Lehigh University’s campus, attending Indian classical dance and other events at Zoellner Arts Center. In her junior year of high school, she did an unpaid internship in the Turbulent Flow Lab at Lehigh, headed by Arindam Banerjee, Professor and Chair of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics. She focused on testing bio-inspired water turbine designs, which replicate natural shapes such as the flippers of marine mammals, in the engineering of wind turbine blades for performance and durability. These cultural, social, and academic experiences made Lehigh a natural pick for her undergraduate education.
Since starting at Lehigh, though, Varsha has turned her attention to electrical energy and renewable energy in particular. She’s presently focused on developing energy storage systems–batteries and supercapacitors–to enhance renewable energy applications.
On a sunny day like those that broiled the Lehigh University campus–and much of the East Coast–in late June, the force of the sun seems nearly all-powerful. But as the sun sets, that energy disappears. And if you rely only on solar to keep your essentials–laptop, phone, air conditioner, water heater–going, darkness could cause a complete shutdown. Varsha’s research will help find efficient ways to store the solar or wind energy and contribute to the nation’s growing demand for electricity.
As she explains: “My project is about hybrid energy storage systems. We can store excess [solar] energy that isn’t being used. Whenever we’re not generating enough energy, we can use that stored energy. The term is ‘peak shaving’–it’s a more efficient way of not wasting over-generated energy.”
To find out how to optimize the mechanics of the storage, the systems need to be modeled via computer. Varsha says, “I’m using a method called ‘sparse regression’ to correctly model it, and that’s where a lot of research is happening. That’s the research that’s happening in Dr. Khazaei’s lab. My mentor, Zhongtian Zhang, is also working on battery energy storage systems. I’m working on hybrid energy storage systems that include batteries and supercapacitors.”
Other researchers in Khazaei’s lab are looking at energy use in data centers. Varsha’s research doesn’t directly apply to that work. But the U.S. has a growing demand for electricity of any kind, from renewables to legacy sources. A 2024 report from the Berkeley Lab Energy Analysis & Environmental Impacts Division says that data center energy demand increased 18% between 2018 and 2023, and it will increase as much as 27% between 2023 and 2028. This growing demand is caused in part by the data centers that enable increasingly popular artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as by demand by electric vehicles, onshoring of manufacturing, and electrification of buildings and industry. Satisfying that demand will require bringing all forms of energy, from fossil fuels to renewables, online in an efficient manner, and that includes energy storage.
The drive to create energy pathways to satisfy this increasing demand will continue, so Varsha’s interest in energy storage will find plenty of space to grow. STEM-SI could serve as one of her first stepping stones on this engineering path. She’s attracted to working in the lab because it’s “very hands-on,” applied science. She can also see herself growing: after freshman year, which was all “basic stuff,” she now “reads papers [in journals] and I can see what I'm learning in the classroom coming to life.” Although she knows she has a lot to learn–“really all I know right now is basic circuits,” she says—she also knows that research gains also are “what you make of it. It comes from your own motivation and the time you put into it into your project. I was really motivated by learning about MATLAB and Simulink for the first time.”
As a rising junior with an eye on the 4 +1 Master of Science in Engineering program, which lets a student earn a master’s degree in one year after their Lehigh undergraduate degree, Varsha finds returning to her STEM-SI projects from last summer beneficial. “I was stressing out over something for an exam last semester. Then a couple of weeks ago, I saw it actually applied in something that we use in real life.”
It’s not all epiphanies, though. An important part of research is publishing the data and learning found in the lab, and that means writing. “I haven’t done a lot of writing in the past few years,” Varsha says. “I think I’ve learned that I need to be a better writer, so one of the great things about the whole program is that I, based on my research last summer and what I’m continuing with this summer, can write a research paper [for publication], and Dr. Khazaei is helping me out with that. It’s a challenge!”
Although Varsha doesn’t have her future completely mapped out, she’s thinking she’ll go into industry after a master’s degree. No matter what she decides, she’s made a strong start through the STEM-SI program and supportive mentors–and if we’re all lucky, she’ll help find the electricity to keep our devices and economy running for a long time to come.