Internship Spotlight – Sofia Hornstein and Shreyas Bhat
Meet Sofia Hornstein, senior and Mechanical Engineering major at Duke University and Shreyas Bhat, Master’s degree candidate in Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. They’re two of our many talented interns we had the pleasure of employing this summer.
“The best part of this job was seeing so many engineers in action, seeing how everyone jumps in to collaborate,” Sofia shared. She valued the ability to see “engineering at work in industry – how a product goes from R&D to manufacturing,” and added it was especially rewarding to work on “something that matters, that is valuable to people.”
Shreyas, who works in the Technology Development group, has a similar view saying “it matters to me that my work has a positive impact. Solving human problems is good science and I never want to lose sight of that.” He also added: “There is a lot more at stake. It HAS to be accurate.” Shreyas spent his internship optimizing and characterizing heating systems, which are critical components for PCR assays. Dr. Rainer Ng, head of the Technology Development group at Baebies, has been pleased with Shreyas’ contributions. “Shreyas was able leverage his background in image processing and software engineering to start collecting meaningful data on his project almost immediately.”
Sofia’s work was supervised by Dr. Sebastian Mestril, Senior Production Engineer. “Sofia was very instrumental (pun intended) in helping keep the instrument production line moving along. We were very pleased with how much progress she made developing a proof-of-concept prototype automating the FINDER detector alignment process.” Senior Production Engineer Knute Svenson commented that Sofia was very curious about all aspects of the instrument production process at Baebies and asked all the right questions. “As an Operations Intern, she was able to work closely with members of the R&D team to design and implement the prototype automation fixture and made enough progress to show that the project is worth continuing in the future.”
The Baebies team wishes Sofia and Shreyas all the best as they complete their final year of studies.