Research is often an empowering experience for undergraduates, but for six students who spent the summer of 2016 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, their efforts generated results that could also help bring power to people around the world.

The team worked to develop small, self-contained electric power grids, or microgrids, under the guidance of Giri Venkataramanan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison, and Ashray Manur, a graduate student in Venkataramanan’s group.