Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

ESTOMP input-card generator

The first project I was assigned was to build a tool that can help the simulation team model long term behavior of nuclear waste disposal.

The team I worked with models the long-term behavior of roughly 50 million gallons of nuclear waste stored in underground tanks at Hanford. The simulator, ESTOMP, is powerful and written in Fortran in the early 2000s. To run a simulation, input cards are needed which are long text files where one malformed line kills a run.

To help solve this problem, I wrote a Python GUI that collects parameters through a real interface and emits a valid input card. Less time lost to typos, fewer failed simulations, and a format that a new researcher can actually approach. The work ended in a poster presentation that was presented at the final internship summit along with at the WM Symposium, where I was awarded as a Roy G Post Scholar.

The honest lesson was less about modeling than about legacy systems: messy formats, undocumented assumptions, and domain experts whose workflow you have to understand before you can improve it.

EPA 1315 data processing

Continuing as a technical intern, I built the pipeline that turns raw EPA 1315 leach-test measurements into publication-ready output: a standardized input schema, a Python script that computes the derived values, and a dynamic Excel template covering every variation of the test.

My mentor and I submitted it for the lab's formal software review so it can be used in live research — my first exposure to QA and code review in a regulated setting, and a genuinely useful one.