Curiosity in Power Electronics: Reflections with Jovana Plavšić

Power electronics is not a field that rewards the faint of heart. It is dense with tradeoffs, full of messy realities, and populated with problems that never seem to stay solved for long. For Jovana Plavšić, this complexity is not a deterrent but the very thing that pulled her deeper. She remembers the early pull toward fixing things as a child, the spark that grew into a passion for magnetics and converters in university. From there, it only expanded—research projects, published papers, startups, and the wild ride of trying to turn fragile prototypes into durable products.

Her reflections are less like a lecture and more like a set of lived stories—moments that carry lessons without pretending to be universal rules. Power electronics, as she sees it, is equal parts rigor and curiosity, paired with persistence and a certain stubborn joy in chasing answers. It is a field that demands humility because nothing in it comes easy, but also a field that rewards those who are willing to stay curious long enough to uncover what others miss.

Falling in Love with Magnetics

Ask Jovana what drew her into power electronics, and she lights up over magnetics. It wasn’t the equations in the textbooks that caught her, but the act of designing, building, and testing converters. “I loved the magnetics part, the concept design of a converter—it was an eye opener.” In that hands-on work she saw what made the field so intoxicating: hardware humbles you, but it also rewards you with tangible proof when things finally click.

Magnetics, in particular, became her anchor. In a converter, nothing is theoretical for long. Every choice of core material, winding strategy, and geometry shows up in the lab, either as efficiency gains or as heat. She remembers long hours trying different winding topologies, not just to make something work but to understand why it worked. That understanding, more than the immediate result, was what stuck. “Every time a new material comes, it reshapes what’s possible,” she says, noting how innovations in magnetics keep the field alive with new potential.

Unlike fields where you can hide behind abstraction, power electronics forces confrontation with physics. Inductance, heat, parasitics—none of them go away because you’d like them to. This, she says, is what kept her hooked. It’s not just solving puzzles; it’s grappling with the real world until it bends, just slightly, to your will.

The Tug Between Research and Reality

University gave her the space to dive deep—labs, simulations, summer schools, the thrill of writing and publishing. But startups gave her a different education: speed. “In MVPs, engineers want something that works perfectly—customers often just want proof it works at all.”

That tension is familiar to every hardware designer. The dream of the elegant, optimized converter meets the reality of a customer who just needs five boards in the field by next month. For Jovana, the point is not to abandon depth but to understand context. Sometimes you polish, sometimes you sprint. The wisdom lies in knowing which mode you’re in.

She laughs about moments when engineers will argue over tiny efficiency gains while the customer only cares that the device powers on and survives a demo. “Sometimes a customer wants five prototypes in a year. As engineers we’d rather build three really good products in two years.” The misalignment is built into the field, but learning to navigate it is part of becoming a professional. Her advice is to never lose sight of the customer’s need, but also to protect the integrity of the engineering work.

Honesty Over Hype

What carries her through those moments is honesty. She insists that trust in engineering doesn’t come from promising the moon, but from being real about what is possible. “Honesty in project timelines is the main thing that keeps trust alive.” Customers remember when you set expectations clearly—and they remember when you don’t.

It’s a philosophy that extends beyond schedules. In power integrity testing, in converter design, in every decision where shortcuts tempt, honesty with yourself and your team is what prevents failure down the road. Better to admit that a board will take six months than to pretend it can be done in three.

For her, honesty has been as much a leadership lesson as a personal one. “My CEO knows when to give me time to understand something and when to push me forward. That balance is rare.” Leaders who are transparent about goals and pressures, she says, help engineers do their best work. Hype and spin may win attention, but honesty is what builds relationships that last.

Standing Out in the Crowd

Being a woman in power electronics means Jovana has stories others don’t. At her first big fair, she remembers, they thought she was serving drinks rather than asking about topologies and modules. That sting stayed with her, though not as discouragement. Instead, it became fuel. “I stood out as a woman asking tough technical questions—and I don’t think that’s unnatural.”

Her time in Serbia tells a different story. Her student team there was majority women, a reminder that representation is not about capability but culture. What that experience taught her is that engineers are shaped by the people they see in the field. The more diverse the representation, the more likely young engineers are to picture themselves belonging.

She laughs now at the memory of being underestimated, but the point is serious: for a field like power electronics to grow, it needs not only new materials and better converters, but also more voices. Different perspectives enrich the work just as much as new tools or topologies do.

Breadth Builds Depth

Plavšić refuses to confine herself to a narrow lane. While some engineers see careers as linear, she sees them as expansive—networking outside her immediate field, saying yes to summer schools, startups, and new collaborations. “I always say yes to different things—summer schools, seminars, startups—it’s all learning.”

That breadth, far from distracting, enriches her technical work. By pulling insights from law, design, or business, she builds resilience into her engineering practice. Breadth creates cross-pollination. A hardware challenge can be reframed by a perspective from another discipline, and often that reframing is what unlocks the solution.

She points out that many of her best insights into converter design came not from textbooks but from conversations with peers who thought differently. “Exchanging knowledge is everything. You can hear six different approaches, and maybe the seventh doesn’t help—but the eighth changes everything.”

Gratitude, Balance, and Persistence

Despite the pressures, deadlines, and occasional slights, she talks often of gratitude. Gratitude for professors who let her build, for colleagues who shared knowledge freely, for mentors who pushed her forward. “Gratitude keeps me balanced. I’ve been lucky to meet amazing people at the top of research.”

Balance, in her telling, isn’t about doing less work. It’s about remembering why the work matters. It’s about seeing every failed converter as a step forward, every simulation crash as part of the process. It’s about finding joy even when the prototype on your desk is stubbornly refusing to cooperate. “Sometimes learning the hard way is the best way.”

She admits that in an age of AI design tools, it’s tempting to outsource the hard parts. But she resists. For her, wrestling through the problem is part of the reward. Learning the hard way, she argues, isn’t wasted time—it’s how you build real understanding that can’t be shaken when the tool fails or the model doesn’t apply.

Engineering as Human Endeavor

What comes through in all of Jovana’s reflections is that engineering is not just technical. It’s deeply human. It’s about people sharing knowledge, building trust, learning from failure, and sometimes fighting to be seen as legitimate voices in the room.

She sees power electronics not just as components and circuits, but as a living system of people and ideas. Teams succeed not just because they pick the right converter topology, but because they communicate, they stay honest, they stay curious. The same principles that govern whether current flows cleanly also seem to govern whether people collaborate well.

Her reflections echo this human dimension: “The culture of a team shows up in the quality of its designs.” In other words, bad culture leads to fragile hardware. Healthy, curious, open culture leads to designs that last.

Conclusion

For Jovana Plavšić, power electronics is both profession and philosophy. It is the place where curiosity meets grit, where research shakes hands with reality, and where honesty builds trust that hype can’t replace. Her journey shows that engineering isn’t just about delivering clean volts or efficient magnetics—it’s about cultivating the persistence to learn, the gratitude to keep perspective, and the curiosity to stay in the fight.

“Curiosity has carried me farther than any plan,” she says. And in the world of power electronics, where reality always gets the last word, that curiosity may be the most reliable source of power there is.