Photo by Patty Eagan/ACEP.
ACEP 2025 summer interns gather by after touring the nearby battery energy storage system.
By Yuri Bult-Ito
ACEP summer intern RJ Michael gives a presentation on his 2025 project.
RJ Michael is fascinated by data. And that fascination has led him into recent internships at the ҹɫ that have already advanced one of his life goals.
“I want to give back to the community,” Michael said.
He’s gotten a strong start on that mission during the past two summers while interning with the UAF Alaska Center for Energy and Power.
A Gwich’in Athabascan, Michael grew up in Bethel, a town in southwestern Alaska off the road system. His first internship helped another similarly situated rural community — Kotzebue in northwestern Alaska.
After designing and organizing a training series, Michael gave a cybersecurity awareness presentation to all employees at the in summer 2024. It was so well received that it piqued the interest of KEA to consider offering the training annually.
Dozens of students like Michael, a computer science and mathematics student at UA Anchorage, have completed such internships at ACEP during the past 17 years.
The internship program aims to give Alaska’s industries and communities what they need most — qualified, engaged and connected employees.
“Preparing the next generation is a big part of that,” said Gwen Holdmann, chief scientist and founding director of ACEP.
Real-world opportunities
Founded in 2008, ACEP has had interns from the start. Today, more than 160 students have participated, working on an even greater number of projects.
“From the very beginning, we’ve built internship programs with Alaska students in mind, connecting them with utilities and real projects that matter here at home,” Holdmann said.
RJ Michael, right, stands by as Golden Valley Electric Association engineer Adam Saunders checks the transformer meters at GVEA’s Gold Hill substation during Michael’s internship in 2025.
The program, which now runs for 10 weeks during summer, offers real-world project opportunities for college students through training and mentoring with ACEP researchers, its industry and agency partners and other experts.
“It’s about giving them hands-on experience while also showing that the energy industry is an exciting and meaningful place to build a career,” Holdmann said.
Interns gain a holistic perspective on energy issues and training for practical problem-solving skills. They engage in a wide range of topics, including marine energy field work, geothermal assessments, microgrid power systems integration, beneficial electrification, data collection and programming, energy education and outreach for communities.
The 2025 season featured 17 interns selected from 162 applicants. The students come from diverse geographies and disciplines.
Haley Paine takes a selfie in September 2017 on the way to the Oooguruk oil field, located in the Beaufort Sea approximately 5 kilometers off Alaska’s northern coast.
Having built their skills solving real problems for communities in Alaska, many program alumni remain in or come back to Alaska and contribute to energy and other sectors in the state.
A road to statewide service
Haley Paine was one of the interns in the early years.
She came from California to Alaska for a summer in 2008. She eventually found that energy was something she was truly passionate about. She did her internship in 2013 while working on her master’s degree in natural resource management and geography at UAF.
During her internship, Paine worked on the Global Application program, an effort to identify places with energy challenges similar to rural Alaska’s, with the goal of sharing expertise and technology. The foundational effort was an investigation of Iceland. Paine’s work as an intern eventually evolved into the at ACEP today.
“ACEP gave me the chance to make connections in the energy industry in Alaska that are necessary for young professionals,” Paine reflected.
Paine received a master’s degree from UAF and, in tandem, a graduate certificate from UA Anchorage in environmental regulations and permitting. She then began working at the , which is responsible for the management of the state’s hydrocarbon resources.
Haley Paine, far left, moderates a panel at the 2024 Resource Development Council annual conference in Anchorage.
Paine started there in 2015 as a natural resource specialist and advanced to become deputy director in 2021, overseeing 90 staff members and making sure Alaska’s oil and gas is responsibly and safely developed.
“I want [my children] to grow up here,” Paine said. “And just knowing that a really vital piece of our state's economy is growing and looking to thrive is really important.”
ACEP 2024 summer intern Lydia Andriesen connects wiring on the Tanana River Hydrokinetic Test Site barge during fieldwork for hydrokinetic testing.
Hands-on work, community engagement
The hands-on aspect of the project attracted Lydia Andriesen.
Growing up in Haines, a town in Southeast Alaska, Andriesen always enjoyed helping her father, a carpenter, build things. And she has loved math since she was little.
Her internship experience in 2024 during her junior year at UAF was an introduction to marine energy research. Andriesen worked on technology that uses the motion of water to produce energy.
Her experience was more than what she had expected.
She learned how to deploy instruments to collect data on the Tanana River in Nenana. She also worked on a resource assessment for a potential marine energy project in rural Alaska. She learned to be prepared and to be flexible when things don’t turn out as planned. When weather kept the team in Kotzebue, they were lucky to be able to enjoy the local Fourth of July festivities.
“Throughout my internship, I found it fascinating to see all that goes into the research side of engineering,” she said. “There is so much active problem solving in the field, and I gained a lot of experience in pivoting when things didn’t go as planned.”
She also appreciated the community engagement work in Kotzebue.
ACEP 2024 summer intern Lydia Andriesen assembles a seafloor mooring for an acoustic Doppler current profiler that was deployed in a channel in Kotzebue Sound that summer.
“It was great to talk to community members about the research happening in their town and to help keep an open conversation between scientists and locals,” she said. “Growing up in a small town of Haines, I know the value of this relationship.”
Nurturing future generations
“Working with interns is great,” Michelle Wilber said with enthusiasm.
Wilber is a research engineer at ACEP and was herself an intern in 2018. Since then, she has mentored 23 students.
Michelle Wilber, second from right, poses for a photo with her research team, including her intern mentee Jessica Egbejimba, second from left, on sea ice in Kotzebue in 2023. Egbejimba worked on a cold-weather electric vehicle project.
“I’m not trying to get them into an electric utility. I want to help them to grow new skills for their own future professions,” she said.
Having raised a family and done her internship as she was finishing up her master’s degree in mechanical engineering, Wilber has a broad perspective.
Wilber believes in intrinsic motivations people have and wants to nurture them.
“I started this career relatively late in life,” Wilber said. “I feel it is important, at this point, to help develop the people who will take on the work after I am no longer contributing in this way.”
Prior to her internship at ACEP, Wilber did a variety of work in rural and urban settings, including education, outreach and information dissemination for the public, coordination of an organic garden and writing grant proposals.
All her background has come together at ACEP.
Michelle Wilber, second from right, and her fellow interns tour the bifacial solar photovoltaic test site on the ҹɫ Troth Yeddha’ Campus in 2018.
Her internship led directly to a job as a research engineer at ACEP, determining the course of her life since then.
“A lot of work at ACEP is interdisciplinary,” Wilber said. “And all the facets of my life and career — my interest in energy, background in physics and hard science and a lot of different work in rural Alaska — have come together at ACEP.”
Wilber finds that gains are reciprocal between interns and mentors.
“I learn new skills and ways of looking at the world from [interns], and I teach what I know,” she said.
Uncovered talents
The internship offers a nurturing and supportive environment where skills are developed, talents are discovered and passions are uncovered.
“We have witnessed an increasing interest from curious, innovative students wanting to be a part of our program as well as community partners with projects for interns,” said Annalise Klein Gerlach, a program architect who leads the internship program at ACEP today.
Some interns learned so much that they came back for a second round.
RJ Michael shows a heat map of solar energy generated at the locations where it is consumed in Golden Valley Electric Association’s service area in Fairbanks, Alaska, during his presentation in 2025. Areas in red represent higher concentrations of solar panels, while areas in blue represent fewer.
Michael, the UAA computer science and mathematics student from Bethel, originally did his summer internship in 2024. And he came back in 2025.
For his 2025 project, Michael worked closely with a Fairbanks utility, Golden Valley Electric Association, to improve the accuracy of solar forecasts to help energy planners use energy resources more effectively.
He studied historical solar energy generation and developed machine-learning models to forecast the next 24 hours of solar generation in Fairbanks.
“I appreciate the opportunity to explore data science within computer science in a way that directly benefits Alaska communities,” Michael said.
Beyond the internship
The summer experience often becomes a critical juncture in the intern’s life.
“We are excited to continue developing opportunities that place students from Alaska in environments where their STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) knowledge and place-based skill set can lead to long-term career opportunities in the state,” Klein Gerlach said.
ACEP 2024 summer interns Lydia Andriesen, left, and Jack Schuster take a break from their field work on a barge at the Tanana River Hydrokinetic Test Site in Nenana.
Andriesen, who worked on marine energy during her internship, said her experience led her into the five-year combined bachelor’s and master’s program in mechanical engineering at UAF.
Michael, for now, is focused on graduating this winter and continuing next year as a graduate student at UAA.
“And then I want to do something for small communities in Alaska,” he said.
Looking back on her internship experience and path since then, Paine said she sees that ACEP staff members helped her through a challenging time in her life.
“They helped me to find the professional direction that gives me tremendous satisfaction,” she said. “I also find it rewarding that my path routinely crosses with current and former ACEP team members.”
“It is a network, a club, that you can take with you beyond the summer there,” she said.
Yuri Bult-Ito is a storyteller with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at the ҹɫ.