What do you do when the plans stop matching reality?

In this episode of Breaking Frozen Ground, Bill Schnabel talks with Sarah Schacher, PE, about the moments when engineering becomes less about calculations and more about judgment, leadership, and trust. From unexpectedly managing a major highway paving project early in her career to helping rural Alaska communities secure critical funding and navigate complex infrastructure challenges, Sarah shares lessons learned from more than two decades in the field. It's a conversation about people, problem-solving, and what it takes to keep moving forward when no textbook has the answer.

Music by the talented David Wolfe

Raghu Srinivasan operates an atmospheric corrosion test site at a working rocket-launch facility on Kodiak Island, and that is not even the most unusual stop on his journey to Alaska. He grew up in Tamil Nadu, India, studied chemical and electrochemical engineering at the National Lab, Central Electrochemical Research Institute. He moved to Hawaii for graduate school before telling his wife they were relocating “from the fiftieth state to the forty-ninth” - perhaps forgetting to mention that a tenure-track job meant Last Frontier might just become their last move. Since arriving, he has established the Environmental Degradation Lab, led a middle-school corrosion camp for five years, studied deicing brines containing up to approximately 23% salt, and been selected for the University of Alaska’s second cohort of President’s Arctic Professors.

Shelly Thomas sits down with the UAA mechanical engineering chair for a conversation about atmospheric corrosion in the Arctic, collaboration, curiosity, and the unexpected journey from India to Hawaii to Alaska.

Brian Walch spent twenty years interviewing candidates for promotions before one answer stopped him cold - a woman told him she simply found people doing the job she wanted and asked them how. It's the reason he coaches leaders differently today. Long before that, he was the software guy who envied engineers their collective culture, passed down from a father who moved to Alaska in 1966 and never left. Since founding Shiftfocus, he's built a national speaking career around ideas most leaders haven't caught up to yet, including one about AI that most people get backwards. Shelly Thomas sits down with the founder of Shiftfocus for a conversation about reinvention, AI, and the bets leaders should be making right now.

Music by the talented David Wolfe

Dr. Gwen Holdmann lives in a house built out of shipping containers, with a root cellar dug to bedrock and a refrigerator that rises up through the floor on command — and it's the least surprising thing about her. Long before the house, she was a 29-year-old engineer who called every geothermal company she could find and got told no, until she figured out how to build a power plant anyway. Since then she's stood up a research institute from a one-page idea, run the Iditarod through its hardest trail year on record, and finished a PhD three decades after she started it. Bill Schnabel sits down with his neighbor, coworker, and ACEP chief scientist for a conversation about building things nobody thought were possible, and why, for her, it was never really about the technology.

Music by David Wolfe

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 of her students became the first person in Alaska to receive a NASA Space Tech Fellowship.

In this episode, Bill talks with Denise about the career she never planned: the PhD she took on a dare, why she thought Fairbanks was going to look like Greenland, what it was like showing up to a faculty interview with a one-year-old, and why the last thing she'll give up before retirement is that lab. 🎙️

Theme music credit: the talented David Wolfe

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 Registration, and co-founded a global engineering competition that's still running today.

This is a story about what happens when you stop treating Alaska as a stepping stone.

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 conversation with a former UAF dean that sent two mechanical engineers down a nerd rabbit hole that changed everything, why he started an entirely new company after one meeting about pilot housing at Eielson, and the thing he's been building quietly that could change the math on how Alaska constructs its future. 🎙️

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 deep, along Northern Lights and Spenard. Sarah called it the best workout she'd ever had. She stayed.

Today, Sarah is the safety manager at Colaska, one of the largest road construction firms in the state. She started as a general laborer in 1997, moved into grade checking, went back to school for construction management, and now leads safety for crews building roads across Alaska. In this episode, Bill Schnabel sits down with Sarah to talk about what she learned working in the hole while everyone else sat in heated trucks, why she believes teaching people beats forcing them every single time, and what she wishes drivers understood about the people building the roads they're speeding through. 🎙️

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 actually making things in Alaska. At her last networking event in Palmer, a founder still in the prototype phase sat across from the owner of a 70-year-old Fairbanks manufacturing company, swapping notes. That's not an accident. That's the whole point.

In this episode, Megan tells Shelly how she went from the Army to the FAA to her dad's basement in Alaska to launching a granola company to building a statewide manufacturing community. She shares her "spinning plates" framework for not losing your mind, why community over competition is a survival strategy in Alaska, and one of the best lines we've had on the show yet: closed mouths don't get fed. 🎙️

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 monitoring platform built in Anchorage.

He's also a UAA grad, founder of the UAA robotics club, Alaska Angel Conference Audience Choice Award winner, and current G Beta Anchorage participant.

In this episode of Breaking Frozen Ground, Shelly Thomas sits down with Erik to talk about what it actually looks like to deploy monitoring stations across the North Slope by helicopter, why he had to leave Alaska to start his career and what pulled him back, and the thing he said about ideas becoming reality that neither of us has been able to stop thinking about. 🎙️