When Bridget Powers Beggs interned at National Grid in Summer 2020, the internship was so successful, she was offered a part-time position during the school year.

Now, as Powers Beggs prepares to graduate from Case Western Reserve University with her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, she is also preparing to head to National Grid’s headquarters in Albany, New York, where she will become an Assistant Associate Engineer in Electrical Planning and Design. Her main duties will include executing the company's clean energy/decarbonization goals, including incorporating energy storage, distributed generation, dual fuel heat pumps, and electric vehicle chargers for a future electric grid.

Powers Beggs ended her CWRU career with her senior project, “Identifying Perovskite Solubility Limits via Machine Learning.” Working with Associate Professor Alp Sehirlioglu, Powers Beggs conducted materials data science research, created a dataset of perovskite solid solutions and their attributes and coded a machine learning model to predict the solubility limits of other perovskite solutions based on the aforementioned dataset. Using RStudio and the American Ceramic Society/NIST Phase Equilibria Diagrams Online database, Powers Beggs enjoyed learning about differences between machine learning models, including Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors and Support Vector Classification. “Random Forest was the most accurate for my data, but KNN had a very close level of accuracy in a fraction of the time, while SVC, which I thought would be the best choice originally, was much less accurate due to overfitting,” she said.

As her engineering career begins, Powers Beggs’ main goals are making an impact on climate change and using an interdisciplinary collaboration to bring technical and non-technical audiences together.