Phlow Corporation
Position: Manufacturing Maintenance Intern
Dates: May 2025 — August 2025
Job Description: At Phlow, I worked as a maintenance intern to establish several foundational infrastructure projects for the startup phase of the Petersburg API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) manufacturing plant.
The first project I led was the initiative to develop a comprehensive inventory system for the SAPIR (Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient Reserve) warehouse to provide a continuous spare parts inventory for the maintenance and facilities teams. Prior to my time at Phlow, there was no internal record or inventory keeping of the spare parts on-site, leaving the maintenance department in the dark about what components were available when undertaking repairs. With the system in place that I designed, however, the maintenance team was able to dramatically speed up their repair timelines, and spare parts could easily be located through an online searchable inventory system which corresponded to the warehouse.
The second major project was the Petersburg Site Master Equipment Bills of Material, which sought to catalog and record relevant information on all the active equipment being used on-site. This resulted in over 15,000 data entries for over 5,000 different pieces of equipment and spare parts. This involved several site-walks to determine serial numbers and part information as well as consulting P&ID diagrams and contacting vendors to determine information which was previously unrecorded, including temperature and pressure limits, necessary valves and instruments, fittings and inlets, and more. This tremendously improved the maintenance team's ability to diagnose and correct issues, as having access to a full list of the equipment and sub-components on-site allowed the maintenance team to identify necessary repairs much faster.
Finally, I took on a number of smaller projects, including repurposing a Conex container as a vendor-managed inventory site and workshop, transferring turnover files from our contractor's database to a Phlow-owned and managed system, and following with a process chemist in the R&D lab. I also contributed to routine mechanical maintenance of process and HVAC equipment. Overall this experience dramatically improved my project management skills, and I was extremely excited to learn from the talented engineers and scientists working around me. I'm extremely grateful for the opportunities I had at Phlow and they helped to forge me into a more competent engineer with an eye for detail and a knack for maintenance.
Virginia Microelectronics Center
Position: Undergraduate Research Intern
Dates (1): October 2023 — May 2025
Dates (2): August 2025 — Present
Job Description: At the Virginia Microelectronics Center (VMC), I work as an undergraduate research intern, assisting the lab's process engineers as well as our post-doctorate and student users in the cleanroom. My daily tasks include placing and managing procurements, project management, equipment testing and characterization, troubleshooting and maintenance, facility renovations, and more. I am highly experienced in microfabrication processes such as wafer photolithography, metallization, deposition, and etching, and I have hands-on experience applying these processes for my own device research. I help to ensure our cleanroom is effective and usable for both education and research, and I am personally responsible for providing training for photolithography, etching, and all strong acid processes. I am personally involved in research at the VMC, and I am working under Dr. Nibir Dhar to help develop a microbolometer device capable of mid-wave infrared imaging using a nanostructured germanium thin film for the Air Force's A-STAR Lab initiative. This has also involved working with ITAR-regulated materials including CdTe, which has contributed to my understanding of the regulatory measures involved in designing for defense. We are currently creating and patterning samples for resistivity characterization of electro-beam deposited germanium as well as annealing impacts.
Through this work I have gained extensive training across a variety of microelectronic fabrication equipment, and I have also had significant experience learning about the inner workings of the equipment itself. I regularly assist with installing, troubleshooting, maintaining, and monitoring sensitive equipment, ensuring it is able to reach the microscopic accuracy required for semiconductor research. This experience has given me a much more grounded understanding of the maintenance process in industrial and lab settings. I also had the wonderful opportunity to be mentored by Dr. Benjamin Horstmann throughout my first year at the lab, who had enormous experience in maintaining sensitive equipment and passed it on whenever possible. Ultimately, my time at the VMC has been invaluable to my growth and has helped me to advance my abilities well beyond where I could be through only coursework, and I'm extremely grateful for the people who made this opportunity so meaningful.
Jefferson Lab Particle Accelerator
Position: Engineering Intern
Dates: June 2022 — July 2022
Job Description: At the Jefferson Lab (JLAB), I worked with a facilities engineer to develop formal criteria for a predictive maintenance system for the particle accelerator's primary support systems. These systems include the low-conductivity water (LCW) and cooling tower systems utilized on-site to maintain the accelerator’s equipment. Along with a partner, we investigated the root causes of previous failures of similar systems at other particle accelerators and research facilities to identify common root causes and symptoms of failure. Based on the available sensors depicted in relevant P&ID diagrams, we determined what parameters ought to be monitored and how rules ought to be implemented for predicting early failure. We included formal recommendations for how these limits should be applied, including where human or machine intervention should be implemented, and presented our work to a panel of engineers working at the accelerator.
We developed criteria for predictive modeling of major facility support systems to provide early warning of creeping failure, conducted a high-level overview of maintenance strategies ranging from reactive to predictive, analyzed historic failures of low-conductivity water systems and cooling towers to locate critical risk points, identified symptoms of creeping failure, and developed formal predictive criteria based on available sensor data. We used this information to correlate component and system risks to develop system fault trees and analyzed P&IDs to identify relevant sensors to feed into those fault trees.
Mission BBQ
Position: Cashier and Expo
Dates: July 2022 — August 2023
Job Description: At Mission BBQ, I worked as both a cashier and expo to deliver a high quality dining experience to guests at the restaurant. I was responsible for taking orders, handling payment, and both assembling and serving food. I became the go-to trainer toward the end of my employment, moving around to assist different employees across all positions in the restaurant and training them in their respective roles.