National Intern Day

National Intern Day is an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions that interns offer across career fields across the nation. Interns and employees alike learn valuable new skills and knowledge about their respective fields through hearing different perspectives, which betters the future workforce. Interns vary in age, experience, cultures, and creative diversity. Without interns, businesses would not be where they are today due to the contributions and participation set forth by those individuals.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) wants to recognize the interns who have come on board this summer to work with the office. Please welcome this summer’s interns:

Evan Bass

Evan attends Dartmouth College where he majors in engineering with a focus on sustainability and renewables. Energy engineering is the “key to intertwining his love for STEM and problem solving” with his concerns for the environment. Since becoming an active member of the Dartmouth Energy Alliance and taking classes such as “Just and Sustainable Transitions in Agriculture,” he understands the imbalance of sustainable energy across his own country and the world. His career goal is to integrate renewable developments into communities with limited access to energy and sustainable resources. As an intern, Evan contributed to all aspects of the CABLE initiative including drafting of the workshop report. Evan spearheaded a university outreach effort for the Prize which resulted in a significant increase in applicants. Evan also helped the AMO Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging task force create a reviewer checklist and contributed to a Greenhouse Gas Decarbonization Big Idea presentation.

Frank Borris

Frank attends North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and is majoring in biomedical engineering. This fall he will be a senior. He credits his early exposure to engineering principals to his general knack for problem solving and his dad, who worked for the U.S. Department of Transportation. He has an interest in STEM, biological systems, and clean energy, and hopes to one day enhance the quality of life for the people around him as well as his own. For AMO, Frank contributed to the planning of the Manufacturing and Integration Challenges for Analog and Neuromorphic Computing workshop and led coordination with speaker and panel invitees. Frank also conducted independent research on current barriers to improving the energy management capabilities of medical implants, focusing on wireless inductive charging as a possible solution and manufacturing issues the technology faces.

David Cobos

David attends Angelo State University and is studying to be a mechanical engineer. This fall he will be a senior. His experience living through the 2021 Texas blackout, only strengthened his interest in improving the U.S. energy infrastructure and improving energy policies. His dream is to become an expert in renewable energy resources to improve our environment and way of living. David contributed strongly to AMO’s Technical Partnerships team as a MEISPP Summer 2021 intern. He drafted replicable partner case study solutions, helped create valuable program resource documents and supported the regional Combined Heat and Power Technical Assistance Partnerships ( CHP TAPS ). His work will help the Technical Partnerships team further engage industry and drive future energy savings.

Christal Eve Maxwell

Christal Eve graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelor’s in Sociology. She brings a wealth of knowledge and skills in human resources, digital marketing, social media, content creation, community relations, change management, and policies and compliance. As an intern for AMO, Christal added great value to the communications team focusing her work on announcement materials to include social media, banner ads, feature items, image searches. In addition to functioning well in a highly fast paced and challenging environment, Christal’s key accomplishments include enhancing AMO's stock photo library, contributing to AMO’s “weekly briefings" and creating this post for National Intern Day.

Anupama Phatek

Anupama graduated this month from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. While attending MIT, she realized that exploring innovations in sustainability using thermodynamics and heat transfer analysis was a future she would like to pursue. Next fall, she plans to pursue a Master of Science and Engineering and hopes to complete a thesis in the field of thermodynamics and energy systems. As an intern, Anupama has developed a framework to inventory industrial decarbonization projects across the DOE and National Labs. This framework will continue to be used and expanded in the coming months and years so that AMO has a more complete understanding of the current state of industrial decarbonization technologies under development. This will form a foundation from which greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets can be based and help inform AMO's technology development pathways.

Tariq Shanks

Tariq graduated from Wake Forest University where he is pursued a degree in politics and international affairs with a minor in communications. He will be attending George Mason University in the fall. Tariq previously interned with the DOE Energy Information Administration and the Solar Energy Technology Office where he worked with the statistics and soft cost teams. Tariq has an interest in diversity and inclusion and hopes to develop skills to advocate for those most marginalized by the legal system. Tariq was a welcome addition and a valued team member on the AMO Communications team with his work on external communications projects. He authored a blog post highlighting the Industrial Assessment Centers (IAC) roundtable event, wrote social media posts for the IAC program announcement, and wrote this National Intern Day feature for AMO. Following his time with AMO, Tariq will consider opportunities in the clean energy field.