Thank You to our Summer Interns
ITASCA Minneapolis is lucky to have welcomed nine summer interns in our consulting, software, and business practices. They have all been doing amazing work and we want to acknowledge their dedication and enthusiasm by celebrating each of them. Learn more about eight of our interns and their contributions to ITASCA below.
Graciela Lopez Campos
University of Texas at Austin
Graciela is a PhD student and graduate research assistant at The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences, pursuing her degree in Geomechanics under the supervision of Dr. Maria Nikolinakou. Her research focuses on subduction megathrust modeling, studying large-strain evolution of subduction systems, discrete faults, and porous fluid flow. She graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Costa Rica in 2021 and worked as a Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineer for Boston Scientific before the start of her PhD. At ITASCA, Graciela is working as a consulting engineering intern working with FLAC3D, Griddle, and Rhino.
Sean Flournoy
Georgia Institute of Technology
Sean, one of ITASCA’s consulting interns, is a graduate student working under Dr. Jorge Macedo studying geosystems engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on using the Material Point Method to simulate large deformation geomechanics problems. This summer he’s been working closely with another consulting intern, Graciela, and under the guidance of Varun at ITASCA, to investigate implementation of virtual beams to provide bending resistance for the ubiquitous joint constitutive model, and he is also assisting with mesh generation for mining projects and developing tutorial videos for FLAC3D.
Amrita Ginne
University of Minnesota
Amrita is an undergraduate student at University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management studying Management Information Systems (MIS) and is this summer’s sales intern. She’s been applying both her academic studies and her previous experience as a business analyst intern at UnitedHealth Group to her work here at ITASCA. She has been working hard to connect with additional global resellers who will aid in selling ITASCA software.
Christian (CJ) Nygard
University of Maryland, College Park
CJ Nygard, an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, has been able to apply his classwork into projects as a software intern at ITASCA. He’s been working on allowing users to check out license seats for offline usage as well as implementing the required security measures to ensure proper usage. He’s also made beneficial upgrades to the license web portal.
Emory Russell
University of Minnesota
Emory is a computer science student at the University of Minnesota and is one of ITASCA’s software interns in Minneapolis. He has been working diligently this summer and has built a proof-of-concept program that embedded Rhino functionality into a QT UI, with the idea that it will replace/augment the existing CAD capabilities built into FLAC3D. He’s also started on user data collection that will be implemented into every piece of ITASCA software.
Aly Sebold
University of Minnesota
Aly is this summer’s marketing intern. Aly recently graduated with a Bachelor’s in business, majoring in marketing from the Carlson School of Management at the UMN Twin Cities. This summer she has applied her previous experience at a digital marketing agency to increasing SEO for the ITASCA software and consulting websites, making the YouTube channels more cohesive as well as publishing content, and spreading ITASCA’s software presence to Instagram.
Nate Stearley
University of Minnesota
Nate, a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota, is completing his second summer as a software engineer intern at ITASCA Minneapolis. His projects this summer include implementing tools powered by machine learning into FLAC, which will allow clients to quickly solve simple systems to calculate metrics, such as factor of safety, in seconds. He’s also working to integrate lithology comments into the latest machine learning algorithms to better predict rock properties where point load tests are scarce.
Daniel Woodell
University of Vienna
Daniel is currently working at the University of Vienna towards his PhD in Earth sciences under the guidance of Dr. Martin Schöpfer. In his research, he has used PFC and FLAC to model structural deformation of volcanoes in response to magma reservoir pressure changes. While at ITASCA as a consulting intern, Daniel has been working with the underground mining team, using coupled FLAC3D/MassFlow models to investigate the feasibility of future mine designs, determine extraction yield, analyze surface subsidence, and model the stress state of the mine to ensure safety throughout its life cycle. He received his undergraduate degree from Colorado College and his Master’s from the University of British Columbia.