Breaking Frozen Ground

Denise Thorsen built classified satellite subsystems for the military before she ever set foot in Alaska. She wasn't told what the spacecraft did. She tested her work, delivered it, and never learned the rest. Today she runs the Space Systems Engineering Lab at UAF, where students build actual satellites, CubeSats that go to orbit. The Air Force Research Lab calls her teams "small but mighty." One...

Elizabeth Beckett, PE came to Alaska at eight years old when her dad took a welding engineering job on the pipeline. She never left. From a desk in Fairbanks, she's designed electrical systems for military facilities on the other side of the world, engineered off-grid solar microgrids inside national parks accessible only by helicopter, won a national lighting award, chaired the Alaska Board of Re...

Glenn Brady's grandmother was a heavy construction contractor in Alaska before it was even a state. Three generations later, Glenn is a PE, a third-generation builder, the owner of Silver Gulch Brewing in Fairbanks, and a civilian engineer who earned a call sign from a fighter squadron in a ceremony that has no official records. In this episode, Shelly sits down with Glenn to talk about the conver...

Sarah Dow's first day on an Alaska construction site ended with her throwing a stop sign at a car that blew past her. (She says it was basically a hockey hip check with a paddle. She played college hockey. This tracks.) Her boss called her dad that night and said "this isn't going to work." Then he came up with a plan to get her to quit by the next afternoon: 100 mailboxes to hand dig, four feet d...

Megan Militello was 17 years old, controlling air traffic in an Iraq war zone out of an airfield the size of Phoenix Sky Harbor. Today she's building something completely different, and arguably just as ambitious. Megan is the executive director of the Alaska Manufacturing Association, which she co-founded in March 2025 to fill a gap nobody else was filling: a real community for the people actuall...

Erik Williams spent one of the wildest days of his early career on a North Slope landfill in negative temps with 30 mph winds, taking his gloves off to connect wires inside a panel box so a sensor could do its job. He tells that story in this episode, and the lesson he took from it is not the one you'd expect. Today, Erik is the CEO and co-founder of BeadedCloud, an Arctic infrastructure monitorin...

Most engineers pick a lane. Natalie Wagner has worked in all of them. Fortune 100 private sector, state government, federal agencies, and her own consulting firm. She's a PE, has a master's in water resources from UAA, and has served as a State Engineer with USDA. And she's spent that expertise on some of the least glamorous, most consequential work in Alaska: rural water systems in communities wh...

Amy Steiner was going to build rockets and go to college anywhere but Alaska. Neither of those things happened, and Alaska is better for it. Today, Amy is the Chief of Geotechnical and Materials at the Alaska District Army Corps of Engineers, and one of the very few engineers on Earth with hands-on experience designing and installing ad freeze piles in frozen ground. When McMurdo Station in Antarc...