Changing Lanes: What drives WWU Racing's Melana Evans

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Changing Lanes: What drives WWU Racing's Melana Evans

August 7, 2025

by Mikayla King

WWU Communications

WWU recent grad Melana Evans didn't have a conventional path to Western. In fact, gaining her degree in electrical engineering is a journey over 10 years in the making.

When Evans graduated from Yelm High School in 2008, she was convinced she wanted to do something in the medical field. But it didn't take long to realize it wasn't the right path for her.

"I realized I was terrible at it," Evans said. "Awful."

Evans decided to pivot to the construction industry, where she got a job as an administrator for an electrical company before slowly climbing the ranks. It's there where she first became interested in electric vehicles.

Evans was working on a tenant improvement project and met an electrical engineer that was building a space in Redmond to work on electrical vehicles. His garage was full of cars from Microsoft and other big tech employees who wanted help to make their electric vehicles faster and more energy efficient.

"I remember going and touring his space and seeing some of the cars that he worked on and just thinking, 'Oh my God, this looks so cool. I don't know what it would take for me to do something like this, but if I could do something like this, that would be absolutely sick.' That was my pie in the sky."

That dream stayed dormant until November 2016 when Evans lost her construction job.

"I was so unhappy, and I wanted to reevaluate," she said. "How do I be happier in the second part of my life? How do I not redo exactly what I'm doing right now: finding a job that pays the bills, climbing the ladder and then realizing that I'm not happy?"

So, Evans decided to go back to college.

Her job in construction had exposed her to a number of engineers, but she ultimately settled on pursuing the once pie-in-the-sky dream of working on electric vehicles. Then, after looking into the programs Washington had to offer, she chose Western for the intimate class sizes and hands-on experience she could gain.

Another appeal was the specific concentrations Western's electrical engineering program offered. When Evans enrolled, she could choose to concentrate on either electronics or energy. Since then, the electrical engineering program has added two more concentrations to its program: artificial intelligence and machine learning, and wireless and signals. In Fall 2026, the electrical engineering program will become its own department, Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. The launch coincides with the launch of a master's program, the first engineering master's Western will offer.

But when faced with the choice of what to focus on, Evans' decision was easy.

"Energy is a huge part of why I wanted to do this," she said. "Energy is not just electric vehicles. It's also utility scale generation. It's what's going to happen in our electrical grid as we integrate all of these green and renewable energies. There's going to be so much growth there, and that's an opportunity."

After years of working toward her goal and many math classes later, Evans transferred to Western in 2021.

It was then that she first found WWU Racing and the Formula SAE Team and, by extension, began working on electric battery management systems for the first time.

"I remember my first month I saw some flyer up that said, 'WWU Racing! Come to our welcome meeting,'" Evans said. "During that meeting, they said, 'You know, this is our very first year developing an electric vehicle.' That was a big part of why I wanted to go to school, so I started showing up to the meetings, and I started getting involved."

Evans became the Chief Electronics Engineer for the team during her third year as a member, which meant she oversaw anything electric in the vehicle. She worked on the very first battery management system the vehicle had, finishing the work started by a computer science student and now alumnus, Peter Schinske.

"He's awesome to this day," Evans said. "He developed the original system, but he was never able to finish it. It's a really hard system to develop - it was above and beyond what most of us are capable of."

Evans took Schinske's hardware design and, with a few changes and the help of her teammates, was able to finish where he left off.

When her senior year rolled around, Evans stepped away from her role in the Formula SAE team, wanting to give someone else the chance to step into a leadership position. It also gave herself a chance to focus on her senior capstone: designing a battery management system of her own.

Evans partnered up with fellow electrical engineering graduate (then senior) Daniel Dellinger to create a better battery capacity management system using Texas Instruments products. The project was funded through a Tesla sponsorship, something Evans is proud of despite the recent controversies surrounding the company and its founder.

"Securing a Tesla sponsorship was a major accomplishment I'm proud of," she said. "And while I'm aware of the recent negative media coverage related to Elon Musk, I don't want it to diminish the hard work and commitment it took to earn the opportunity."

Evans' project aims to make the sometimes volatile and extremely costly lithium batteries electric vehicles use more safe, efficient and longer lasting. Lithium batteries can be finicky and must maintain a stable temperature window during charging and discharging to avoid permanent damage and possible disaster, Evans said.

"We lovingly call these high-voltage battery packs 'bombs' because they technically have that capacity, and if they're not maintained in a certain way, they will absolutely explode," she said.

That's where the battery management system - and Evans' work - kicks in.

"It is like the protection system to make sure that the bomb never goes off fully," she said. "You want them to give out energy. You just want to do it in a controlled mechanism so that the bomb goes off just as much as you want, but not so much that it's actually becoming a hazard."

If all things go according to plan, a modern EV battery will last 10 to 20 years before it needs to be replaced, typically failing before the end of the vehicle's lifespan. However, it is often more cost-effective for someone to buy a new vehicle than to replace the batteries. Depending on a car's make and model, replacement batteries can cost up to $36,000 for parts alone. Cars are not the only vehicles going electric either, with semitrucks, buses and trains making the switch over from gas engines, meaning finding ways to improve a battery's lifespan is more important than ever.

In order to work on a high-voltage project like this, Evans needed a proper test bench. Testing on a real battery segment is very dangerous for high voltage projects, and the price tag for a battery management system testbench is around $50,000. Thankfully, Evans' mentor and project sponsor EECE Associate Professor John Lund was able to help secure funding for a fully encased server cabinet and a battery self-simulator through a donation to The Foundation for WWU & Alumni. This allowed Evans and Dellinger - and any other students - to run power from a wall outlet to simulate up to an 18-cell battery segment, or 60 volts of electricity.

"Melana's growth as an engineer can best be summarized by the challenges she has overcome," Lund said about Evans. "She has designed something that is powered in an unusual way, communicates in an unusual way, ignores nearly every standard of operation and requires over a dozen battery cells and temperature sensors all connected perfectly just to tell if it's working correctly."

Lund said the work Evans does is highly specialized, and the number of engineers on Earth who have designed with the battery management chip Evans uses could fit in a single conference hall. But unlike other engineers at major companies who can spend $40,000 in consulting fees to fix an issue, Evans is on her own.

"I can't even keep track of the number of times she's identified a problem, gone through all the appropriate troubleshooting steps, then a week later tells me she found the issue in a small footnote on page 174 of the datasheet," Lund said.

The project wasn't without its setbacks, either. Evans and Dellinger spent nearly four weeks trying to troubleshoot a communication issue with the battery's microcontrollers that prohibited them from synchronizing, stalling all progress.

Evans and Dellinger spoke with several engineers to help solve the issue, including an unlikely source: a doctoral candidate from Belgium, Wout Vanderwegen at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, who encountered the same error and posted about it online. Dellinger reached out on LinkedIn, and Vanderwegen ended up working with the team for a couple weeks to solve the issue, field questions and check up on their project status.

"I'm just a lowly (college) senior," Dellinger joked about reaching out to Vanderwegen. "Luckily, he was extremely nice, and he did take the time to look at our code and suggest a few things. The hardest part was asking somebody to help who, really, we have no connection to, but luckily, people are friendly and helpful when you're nice."

Ultimately, the team managed to resolve the issue and continue forward, but Evans said the best day is yet to come. That day will be when all the fine-tuning is finished and the systems synchronize consistently. But that's not to say the work will be done - like Schinske before her, Evans will be passing on the project to the next student.

"We're developing a beta prototype. So, the idea is, I develop a working model that I then pass it on to the Formula SAE team, and the team can expand it or contract it as much as they need," she said.

After graduating in June, Evans hopes to find herself working on innovative projects that take electric vehicles to places they haven't been before, like creating electric boats for the water or electric airplanes for the sky. But her true goal is the final frontier: space.

"I would love to go work for NASA," she said. "Oh my gosh, I would cry every day, and I would love it. I'm a big 'Star Trek' nerd."

Though she might be leaving the university physically, pieces of Evans' time here will live on within the EECE department, including one last piece of advice she has for those interested in pursuing the major for themselves.

"Don't be afraid to say hello to instructors, even ones whose class you haven't had a chance to take," she said. "Electrical engineering is a really tough major, and when you're struggling, it can be easy to kind of catastrophize and think that you aren't cut out for it. But those moments are totally normal! And sometimes the only difference between someone who gives up and drops out of the major and someone who pushes through and perseveres is how comfortable they are asking for help from those who can best provide it."

Those looking to start their own EECE journey or learn more about the new master's program can visit eece.wwu.edufor more information.

Mikayla King ('17) covers the College of Science and Engineering and Woodring College of Education for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at [email protected].