Jessica Egbejimba Expands Her Knowledge and Innovation Skills on the ACEP Team
Jessica Egbejimba, a research assistant at ACEP, celebrated her graduation from UAF in May.
June 19, 2023
By Yuri Bult-Ito
During her final semester as an undergraduate majoring in mechanical engineering at UAF, Jessica Egbejimba joined ACEP as a student research assistant.
She submitted her resume during the UAF career fair just because a friend recommended it. She learned that ACEP’s values align with her own. “I knew it would be a perfect place to expand my knowledge and innovation skills,” Egbejimba said.
But it ended up being a much more fruitful experience than she had imagined, with ACEP’s Michelle Wilber and Daisy Huang as her mentors. “I am so blessed to have such patient and kind women guiding me, mentoring me, and leading me,” she said.
The feeling was mutual. Wilber was impressed with Egbejimba. “Jessica is bright and diligent. She not only picked up the coding skills she needed to analyze our EV [electric vehicle] data but also has a talent for presenting the results in an engaging way. It has been wonderful to work with her,” she said.
Egbejimba’s work involves analyzing data, using tools such as the python coding library pandas, for the research team’s project on how colder climates affect electric vehicles and their energy usage.
For the team’s EV project, she wrote coding programs that pulled correct information from the vast raw data collected from Tesla owners around Alaska. She tackled extracted raw data that filled over 20 columns with statistics such as range, distance, and efficiency, with each car having over a thousand rows of unique data needing to be summarized and reorganized in ways such that trends could be identified. Her work uncovered various trendlines these cars produced, which helped the team to further analyze the data to determine if EVs with heat pumps had an advantage in colder climates.
Outside of work, Egbejimba enjoys crocheting, hiking, and longboarding. Over the summer, she also enjoys spending time with her family dip-netting and camping.