Rohan Panday takes an interdisciplinary approach to electrical engineering. This applies to everything from his academic studies, research for Professor Lei Gu, his work on the Penn Electric Racing (PER) team, his internships for SpaceX, and his upcoming job at Tesla as a battery engineer.
“In the real world, it’s very difficult to silo yourself when you’re working on a team,” says Panday on his interdisciplinary approach. Panday applies this in part to his two summers interning at SpaceX where he focused on high-voltage power systems testing and using electrical mock-ups to simulate faults. “I can design the best circuit I want, but if my circuit struggles to integrate with the mechanical assembly or the software teammates write, then that’s where things break down,” Panday says. “Understanding other areas and having interdisciplinary breadth is very important.” To accomplish this, Panday intentionally completed a computer minor, enrolling in classes such as MEAM 1010 to learn in CAD and better communicate with engineers in other disciplines.
Notably, Panday has always taken a broad view of education since his first visit to Penn as a rising high school senior as part of the M&TSI summer program. There, he met several future mentors including Professor Sid Deliwala, Director of Lab Programs in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE). At that time, Panday considered joining the M&T program. “But I wanted an engineering-forward liberal arts education,” Panday says, explaining that he initially entered Penn as a Mechanical Engineering major.
Around that time, Panday also enrolled in Professor Deliwala’s ESE 1110 Atoms, Bits, Circuits, and Systems course. “I just fell in love with it,” Panday says, explaining,”I can’t see an electron, but I can see what it does to the world around me, which is, to me, a very fascinating abstraction.” Subsequently, Panday switched his major to Electrical Engineering (EE).
As a freshman, Panday also joined the Penn Electric Racing (PER) team. “I really wanted to do something on the motor battery side,” Panday says, explaining that team members Alec Dempsey and Katie Zhang not only taught him about batteries but the whole car. “I eventually led the high voltage systems part of the car. Then I was an electrical lead. Now as a senior, I’m mostly a mentor to different parts of the electrical and battery teams.”
In addition to what he learned, Panday describes his experience on the PER team as the place where, “I found my people […] you go through so much with them that you become very close.”
Enrollment in Professor Lei Gu’s ESE 5800 Power Electronics and ESE 6710 High Frequency Power Electronics led to research in Professor Gu’s PENGUIN lab in Panday’s Junior Year. “I took ESE 5800 as a sophomore,” Panday says, explaining it required “trial-by-fire learning. I really loved it and knew this was a subject area that I really wanted to dive into further.” As for ESE 6710, “that was probably my favorite because it showed how the reality of working in power electronics is so different from the theory,” Panday says. “It gave me perspective for my internships.”
Speaking of internships, besides the two summers spent at SpaceX, Panday spent a summer working in the Penn Physics department working on an electronics design for particle detectors. At SpaceX, “I worked on high voltage systems on Starship,” says Panday of the large rocket intended for Mars. In addition, Panday learned how to make more reliable circuits for batteries. “You can make a circuit and it will work once, but now you have to make a million of them. How are you going to make sure they all work and that they last for years?”
The above refers to parallels he found in PER.“Making reliable circuits is harder than it seems,” Panday says.
Panday’s persistence with circuits for battery engineering both at SpaceX and PER paid off. In fact, it was after the PER competition in Michigan that a judge who worked at Tesla referred him to the battery engineering team in Palo Alto, California. There, Panday hopes to learn more about circuits, spend time with his family while also enjoying hobbies such as cooking, going to the gym, and watching movies.