Benjamin Herald Email & Phone Number

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States

Designing superconducting magnets to meet the demands of customers needing innovative tools for scientific research.

Knoxville, Tennessee, United States

Working at HEAT has allowed me to wear many different hats in a professional setting. My duties here include traveling as a field engineer domestically and internationally (Scotland, England, United Arab Emirates, etc.), managing our modest machine shop, developing CAD designs and documentation, and everything in-between. My experiences at HEAT allow me to continually refine my mechanical mindset and use my educational background to assist this growing start-up business with an eye for environmental policies.

Bowling Green, Kentucky, United States

I had the honor of serving as Vice President of the KY Gamma chapter of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honors Society while a Senior student at Western Kentucky University. My roll was to assist the President with hosting our bi-weekly meetings, giving presentations to the organization, and moderate events thrown by the chapter. I also involved myself with the organization beyond the chapter level, participating in regional confrences and even assisting with the induction of the TN-Eta chapter at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Bowling Green, Kentucky, United States

The Carol Martin Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science in Kentucky is a competitive high school where students from across the state who excel in STEM subjects can spend their junior and senior years of high school enrolled in courses at Western Kentucky University. I had the responsibility of tutoring these students in University Physics I & II. Covered subjects include vectors in three dimensions, free body diagrams, kinematics, Newton's laws of motion, static and kinetic friction, momentum principle and collisions, energy principle, basic quantum mechanics, circuitry, electricity and magnetism, and optics. For each of these topics, I created my own study materials, led pre-exam review sessions, and offered one-on-one assistance.

This internship was held virtually for nine weeks in which I worked full-time on my own research project with guidance from faculty mentor Dr. Raphe Kudela from UC Santa Cruz and research mentor Mariam Ayad, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz. My research set out to quantify sea surface temperature changes near offshore wind farms in the North Sea. For my data set, I utilized images from the from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to create map overlays in ArcGIS and time series plots so I could analyze the results over different spatial and temporal resolutions. At the end of the nine weeks, I presented my research and findings via Zoom to the internship body and additional NASA personnel.Along with my personal research project, I was also a part of two additional projects. Dr. Don Blake of UC Irvine in California detects and measures trace gasses in air through whole air sampling. I was given my own box of 24 air canisters this summer to collect air samples from my local parks, metro area, and my residence in order to monitor air quality in different locations. This information will later produce data points that can be studied for air quality control and radiative forcing elements. The second project I worked with was the Citizen-Enabled Aerosol Measurements for Satellites (CEAMS) mission based out of the University of Colorado, Boulder. For this project, I was operated a device to measure aerosol optical depth, instantaneous levels of PM2.5, and weekly average levels of PM2.5. These measurements will be used to verify with measurements taken by satellites in orbit to verify their accuracy while also providing needed data for air quality scientists.